Representation of the People (Electoral Registers Publication Date) Regulations 2020

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord True spoke of Covid-secure working. It is very good to see him on the Bench today and so many Members speaking in the Chamber. That has been a characteristic of the Order Paper today, with far more Peers here and speaking. It is an important symbol to the country at large as we encourage people to get back to work. Going on the Underground this week to my own office and coming back to your Lordships’ House to take part in this debate, I have seen how good it is for people to get together again. The more we have Covid-secure working, the better—whether in electoral calculations or in any other way.

That said, I intend to concentrate my remarks on two areas aimed particularly at parliamentary rather than local government registration. First, people changing constituencies, as is going to happen, and seeing them carved up and redistributed is always disturbing for the Members of Parliament involved. About 20% or 21% of your Lordships—about 170 in number—have been Members of Parliament before and have been through this turmoil. I went through it once in my life. It was disturbing in some ways but reassuring when I suddenly found I had my noble friend Lord Hayward’s family as my new constituents. They seemed to put up with the situation pretty well as time went on.

None of us knows what will happen in the next few months, and I think we need reassurances. My noble friend the Minister took us through the new forms of electoral registration—online, telephoning, less knocking on the doors and all the rest of it—which cause problems, of course. If any other Covid-19 problems suddenly occur, we must not give way to again delaying this process, because we must have the parliamentary redistribution ready by 2023. It is easy for me to say that, but the fog of pandemic seems more all-enveloping and all-confusing than the fog of war ever was. I do not know what will happen, but I look for reassurances that we are going to get on with the task, which hard-working EROs and their teams, working in a Covid-secure way, are doing.

My second point is that security is very important. As I just said, my noble friend took us through the different ways in which potential electors are being approached—telephones and all the rest of it. It is quite clear that the next general election, whenever that is, will be beset by accusations that people are trying to interfere with the elections themselves, whether they are foreign actors, hackers or whoever else. The last thing we want is to see the veracity and truthfulness of the electoral registers undermined in any way with accusations that they were improperly collected. Mercifully, as far as I heard in the list of changes my noble friend read, algorithms were not introduced at all as something that might come along down the track. We should be grateful for that. I urge the Government and EROs nationally to do all they possibly can to ensure that no security breaches happen in any way at all and that security is maintained.