Elections Bill

Cat Smith Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kemi Badenoch]

The Government are committed to increasing participation in our democracy and empowering all those eligible to vote to do so in a secure, efficient and effective way. An important part of that is ensuring that electoral services—be they registering to vote, applying for an absent vote or applying for a voter card—are as convenient and accessible as possible. To that end, we have tabled new clause 11 and new schedule 1 to provide powers to introduce an online absent vote application service and an online voter card application service. These amendments also provide similar powers for such applications in Northern Ireland.

As it stands, it is not possible for electors to apply for an absent vote online. Electors who wish to apply for an absent vote must do so via a paper form that they must submit to their local electoral registration officer via post. New clause 11 and new schedule 1 will enable the identity of applicants using those services to be verified, as well as identity verification for paper absent vote applications, as is already the case for registration applications. That includes powers to enable real-time identity verification—that is, identity verification while an applicant is in the process of completing their application—for voter card applications, absent vote applications and registration applications.

That issue was raised in Committee by the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith). The Government agreed in principle with her points and committed to considering an online service for electors to make applications for an absent vote once further work was done to understand how best to implement such a service. That commitment is being honoured here with the tabling of amendments to provide powers to introduce an online absent vote application service.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for being receptive to the points that were raised in Committee about putting many more of the ways in which we engage with democracy online. I wonder if she has had time to reflect on whether the Government may have gained advantage from pre-legislative scrutiny on the Bill, because it strikes me that not only did the instruction order after Second Reading bring forward parts of the Bill that were not given scrutiny by the full House, but there have also been a huge amount of Government amendments at this late stage. What reflections does she have on the ways in which she might consult the House on constitutional matters before bringing forward Bills in future?

[Kemi Badenoch]

I have nothing further to add to what we discussed in Committee. I understand the hon. Lady’s point—we want our legislation to be as rigorous and robust as possible. I hope that the open relationship that she and I had when she was shadowing me is one that I will be able to continue with her successors. That is how we will get very good legislation on the statute books.

As I was saying, that commitment is being honoured here with the tabling of amendments to provide powers to introduce an online absent vote application service. That will include a process by which the identity of absent vote applicants can be verified. The identity verification process will be made to apply to paper applications as well as to applications made online.

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[Kemi Badenoch]

That is a good question. It is something that we discussed in Committee and we decided that the best way to do that would be through secondary legislation. We did debate what the thresholds were, but this is something that can be resolved when further detail comes out in secondary legislation. I look forward to hearing the hon. Gentleman’s comments at that stage.

As I was saying, amendments 82, 84 and 87 will help ensure clarity to both electors and polling station staff as to which forms of identification will be accepted. In line with other registration decisions, amendment 74 introduces an appeal process against the refusal of an application for a voter card or absent vote.

Finally, on this group of Government amendments, amendments 49 to 50, 76 to 79, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 105 and 108 seek to provide the chief electoral officer of Northern Ireland with the ability to provide confidential lists of dates of birth to polling stations at all elections in Northern Ireland, which will facilitate the implementation of existing provisions.

[Cat Smith]

Before the Minister moves on, I just wonder whether she, since taking up her post, has had a chance to meet the Association of Electoral Administrators, which has raised the concern that it is already quite difficult to recruit volunteers to staff polling stations. Its concern is that being asked to check these forms of ID will be a disincentive for volunteers to come forward because of the potential conflict between a voter whose ID is not valid and the volunteer who is staffing the polling station. Has she discussed that with the Association of Electoral Administrators, and if so, how did that conversation go?

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[Brendan O'Hara]

I think the hon. Gentleman is confusing private rights and public rights. There are public health issues around the consumption of alcohol and the purchase of cigarettes. These are exactly the same debates as we had in 1967, when there were fears about taking a step into the unknown. What is different now, as I said, is that it is not a step into the unknown. It has been proven to work. Why should young people in England and Northern Ireland have different rights from those in Wales and Scotland?

When we had our referendum in 2014, 90% of 16 and 17-year-olds registered to vote and 75% of them turned out to vote on the day. As the hon. Member for Nottingham North said, studies showed that young people had investigated the issues and had multiple sources of information, and many were far better acquainted with the issues than were their parents or grandparents. To go back to the point made by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), if we look at the age of the people leading the fight against climate change and the demonstrators at COP26, we see that overwhelmingly they were young people making their voices heard above everybody else’s. That tells us all we need to know.

[Cat Smith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind remarks. It was a pleasure to serve on the Bill Committee with him. He and his colleague the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) did as much as to scrutinise every line of the Bill as I and my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) did.

The hon. Gentleman talks about extending the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds. Much of the case made for the Bill has been about making our democracy more secure. One of the ways we can make our democracy more secure is by encouraging more people to participate in it. The more people are voting, the harder it is to swing an election unfairly. That is what we heard in the evidence given to the Bill Committee. Does he agree, therefore, that extending the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds, who will go on to develop a far stronger commitment to voting, will actually strengthen our democracy against foreign interference in British politics?

[Brendan O'Hara]

The hon. Lady is absolutely spot-on. As she says, we heard from many witnesses who said that the wider the franchise and the more the people who vote, the less there can be untoward interference.

Why are the UK Government so opposed to giving 16 and 17-year-olds the vote? Unfortunately, the Minister for Levelling Up Communities is no longer in her place. In Committee, I hoped to find out why she thought it was okay for Scotland and Wales, but not for England and Northern Ireland. Her reply to me was:

“There is no need for me to rehash the arguments. I ask him to ask his parliamentary researcher to research Hansard.”––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 26 October 2021; c. 371.]

That was a Minister’s response on this very issue in Committee, and I am sorry she is no longer in her place to correct it.

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[Cat Smith]

Has my right hon. Friend read the transcript of our Committee hearings? I hope that the Minister has had a chance to read the Russia report, because it is imperative for all of us to be well aware of the security threats that face our democracy.

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The point is that I can raise questions here that warrant further investigation—questions about, for example, Lubov Chernukhin, the model of generosity who has given the Conservatives £2.1 million, £1.9 million of it after her husband Vladimir—the same Vladimir who was appointed by Mr Putin’s deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank—received money from Suleiman Kerimov. This was a man who was later sanctioned by the United States Treasury, and not only for being a Russian Government official: he was arrested in France for smuggling in hundreds of millions of euros in suitcases.

Then there is Mr Temerko, another honourable man, who has donated £1.2 million to the Conservative party. I am told that the Prime Minister’s whiff-whaff bats are on the wall of his reception room. The only slight issue is that Mr Temerko is the man who used to operate at the very top of the Russian arms industry, with connections high up in the Kremlin—but, of course, Mr Temerko is an honourable man. He works with another honourable man, Mr Fedotov, who is a key shareholder in Aquind Ltd, which, The Guardian reports, has donated £700,000 to the Conservative party, along with another firm. This is, unfortunately, the same Mr Fedotov who, according to the Pandora papers, has revealed that his fortune was made through an offshore financial structure in the mid-2000s, at about the time when it was alleged to have been siphoning funds from the Russian state pipeline company Transneft. But, of course, Mr Fedotov is an honourable man.

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We always talk about electoral participation, but we also want to encourage participation among candidates. We should take steps to remove any barrier to people saying, “Yeah, I’m going to get involved. I’m going to be a candidate.” The proposal would still demonstrate locality but would protect candidates from the Hobson’s choice of being outside the constituency, albeit by 100 yards, or having to display their full postal address. I would be grateful if the Government took away that point and thought about it. This is a strong Bill that deals with thorny and important issues head-on and I fully support it.

[Cat Smith]

I begin by disagreeing with the hon. Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew). I do not feel that the Bill has had sufficient time to be properly scrutinised by the House. This is the first time that we have had the opportunity to discuss the legislation since the publication of the PACAC report. There are members of that Committee who have yet to speak and the time is now 8.45 pm. I flag to the Minister that if that is her approach to constitutional Bills, she will not bring the whole House with her, which is a dangerous precedent to set.

On amendment 1, which would remove the voter ID clause in the Bill, many Opposition Members have clearly set out the case. Ultimately, it comes down to what is proportionate. Obviously, cases of voter fraud should be pursued by the police and the Electoral Commission, and our police forces should have the resources to be able to pursue those people to get justice, but is the requirement to show photo ID proportionate to the scale of the crimes that are happening?

In 2019 there were only 34 allegations of impersonation, which is probably the widest way that we can look at it, which works out as 0.000058% of all the votes cast. As was pointed out by the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), who made such a good first appearance at the Dispatch Box on this topic, someone is more likely to be struck by lightning three times.

I flag that while Neil Coughlan is waiting to have his case heard by the Supreme Court, there is a question mark over the way in which the pilot trials were conducted. I urge the Minister to take a closer look at that case and assess whether this is the right time. The PACAC report was clear that the measures are being rushed through and that, with cases still before the courts, it is not a sound way to legislate.

If the Government want to fulfil their manifesto commitment to ensure votes for overseas electors, they can do so by decoupling the permission to donate, because that seems to be where the tension is in the House. If the Minister is seeking to bring about compromise on this important Bill, she could do that by accepting new clause 2.

On the Electoral Commission, it is right that it is accountable to us in this House. Throughout the proceedings on the Bill, Ministers have stood up and said that Ministers can make strategic statements for other bodies, but this is a body that regulates political parties, and the party of Government gets to decide the strategic direction for the Electoral Commission, which would then be challengeable in the courts.

There is nowhere else globally—I have tried to find an example—where that happens. Our democracy most closely mirrors New Zealand, Australia and Canada, whose electoral commissions are independent. It is important that the voters have confidence in an independent Electoral Commission. This Bill will throw that into doubt, and by throwing that into doubt we are throwing the confidence in our democracy into doubt.

I wish that I had longer to speak, because there is an awful lot that I would like to say about a pattern of behaviour that has been emerging over the last decade from this Conservative Government, including the introduction of individual electoral registration. We lose 2 million voters and that is the snapshot they use to propose a boundary change to reduce the number of MPs to 600. Then a general election throws up some different results and suddenly we are back up to 650 MPs. We look at the Owen Paterson affair, which involved changing the rules to protect their mates. Democracy in this country is a precious thing. It is under threat globally.

[Ian Lavery]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this Bill is not really about updating electoral law? It is about driving a bulldozer through the electoral processes of this country, demolishing our democracy, disenfranchising 6 million trade unionists, disenfranchising charities and vulnerable people, and moving them away from voting in this country, rather than towards democratic process.

[Cat Smith]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. This should have been a Bill to solidify and make our electoral laws more simple and straightforward, but it actually adds an extra layer of complexity.

Criminalising political protest through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, removing the 15-year rule, which opens our democracy to foreign money, and gagging unions and charities from campaigning in elections while making it easier for foreign money to flood our political systems demonstrate a pattern of behaviour from this Government that is undermining democracy in this country.

I believe that the Minister is a good person, and that the previous Minister is a good person. When the previous Minister gave evidence to PACAC, she made it clear that she would not give political direction to the Electoral Commission, but she was not the Minister forever, and the Minister who sits here today will not be the Minister forever. The Conservatives will not be in government forever. We need to ensure that when we in this House legislate, we prepare for the worst-case scenario. If a fascist or far-right party got control, and we had set up structures that allowed it to ride roughshod over our democracy, could we honestly say that we had done a good job? I do not think so.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call John McDonnell. There will be no time limit, but he must resume his seat no later than 8.55.