Voter Engagement
Debate between John Penrose and Paul Blomfield(8 years, 10 months ago)
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John Penrose
I was about to come to examples of where that has been achieved already with some success. In the case of IER, about 87% of those who were already enrolled were seamlessly moved across, without their having to do anything. They were automatically verified, and their registration was moved across straightforwardly and simply.
There is a great deal that can be done, which brings me on seamlessly to the points made by the hon. Member for Sheffield Central about other opportunities to prompt people. He used the example of students, but there are many other examples. The shadow Minister mentioned private letting agents, which provide an obvious gateway or portal. There is a prompting moment when people move house. The hon. Member for Sheffield Central talked about universities, and the example of Northern Ireland was mentioned, where work has also been done in schools and colleges.
Paul Blomfield
My point was that it is not simply about the opportunity to prompt—that is what we had at Sheffield Hallam, where it produced a 15% student uptake—but the opportunity to integrate systems in which data are already being collected to verify voters. There should be a seamless process of automatic registration. That is what we did in the other university, where we got 64% registration. That applies more widely than to institutions of higher education.
John Penrose
I agree with most, but not all, of what the hon. Gentleman says. There are huge opportunities to make it easier to verify people’s identity, to prompt them and to confirm them as legitimate voters. There are many opportunities, at points at which people intersect with other parts of Government data, when we can do that very effectively indeed.
The hon. Gentleman said that if students were asked to provide their national insurance number and did not happen to have it to hand, they would be discouraged, but there are alternatives, which were exploited in Sheffield. There are other trusted data sources, such as university enrolment data, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Providing the university has the right information—he said that there was an opportunity for software improvement—it could be used to provide the automatic confirmation of people’s eligibility to vote.
Where I gently but fundamentally part company with the hon. Gentleman—although I stay in contact with the shadow Minister—is on the notion of IER being part of a conscious choice for people to enrol. Moving away from the old system of household enrolment is a major step forward. I am sure that I am preaching to the choir when I say that the old system of household enrolment was a little patriarchal, if I can put it that way. Expecting people who want to vote to register is not a great thing to ask.
John Penrose
I find that I am unexpectedly more sensitive to patriarchy than the hon. Lady. That is a phrase I never thought I would utter.
Paul Blomfield
I do not think we are really at odds. What we are saying is that the system we developed at Sheffield requires people to make a decision, but it does not direct them to what that decision is; that is the critical thing. It is about more active engagement.
John Penrose
We are as one on the idea that there is a great deal more that can be done. With any luck, the Electoral Commission’s report will equip us with more facts that show us which avenues it will be most profitable for us to pursue first. It will allow us to prioritise them and make progress.
The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury was extremely organised and asked a series of questions. I do not have time to get through them all, but I will endeavour to. Before I move on, I want to mention the comments of the hon. Members for Glasgow East (Natalie McGarry) and for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley). I am probably misquoting the hon. Member for Glasgow East, but she said—this was a vital comment—that there should be no division between representatives of the people and the people themselves. I am sure that everybody here would echo and agree with that statement.
On the issue of whether the bands around boundaries should be 5%, 8% or 10%, the point is that constituency size must be based on registration to ensure we have genuinely equal representation in this place. The wider the bands, the less fairness there is, in terms of the power of an individual’s vote. If there was a 10% band, there could be a 20% difference between the number of people it takes to elect me and the number of people it takes to elect the shadow Minister. That would be getting too wide for comfort.