Representation of the People Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I shall follow on from my noble friend’s comments and pick up the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to earlier about double, if not treble, registration. The noble Baroness said that she hoped that all universities and academic centres will ensure that they have maximum registration of people resident in that town or city as voters. However, those people will have a home residence as well. Therefore, one is inflating the electoral roll in university cities to the disadvantage of those communities in other parts of the country that do not have university cities nearby.

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, referred to boundary reviews and political advantage. I must admit that I enormously admire his comments about parliamentary boundaries in these circumstances. The places with high levels of student registration that will benefit under automatic registration are the big cities—the Londons, the Manchesters, the Birminghams. As he explained to his Lib Dem colleagues, come the next boundary review, there will be fewer constituencies in Somerset, Wiltshire, Dorset and other similar counties, such as Gloucestershire, a fair number of which, much to my chagrin, currently have rather large numbers of Liberal Democrat MPs.

I make the point quite seriously that, if one is going to include all those people who register for a second residence, one will be expanding the electoral rolls dramatically in London, Manchester and Birmingham to the disadvantage of the shire counties. I do not think that is an appropriate route to go down. There may be solutions where people register at their first home and their second residence is not included for, for example, parliamentary boundary revision, but we cannot have a position whereby large numbers of people are registered to the disadvantage of resident communities in neighbouring shire counties.

I make these comments on the basis that I have heard from a number of people, particularly the Liberal Democrats, that they want free and fair elections. Free elections are that people should be allowed to register to vote themselves—encouraged, yes, but they should have the freedom not to do so. The Bill goes through at inordinate length, saying, “Oh well, we’ll register everybody, and if you don’t want to be on the electoral roll you can deregister”. However, the process involved is pretty tortuous, and large numbers of people genuinely want to hide where they are for a whole series of reasons; I take, for example, abused women as a case in point. They are going to be on the electoral roll, and it will not be a case of, “We will take you off immediately”, because people will not know that they are on until they are notified that they are on.

That takes me to another point, which is that we have to register all these people so that we can improve turnout. Might it not be a good idea if politicians—and I include in that category noble Lords and those in the other Chamber—improved their reputation with the public at large so that those people want to turn out to vote?

Talking of which, the Government have a very good website where you can register to vote. I could walk out of this Chamber now and register immediately. People might wonder why I had nothing better to do, but on Saturday evening I actually went on that site. What astonished me was that 54 people had registered in the preceding few minutes. I challenge noble Lords to go on it on Christmas Day; they will be astonished by how many people register to vote on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. It is not that difficult.

My noble friend Lady Coffey referred just now to the fact that, in an election period, 2.8 million people registered to vote—it was just between 2.8 million and 2.9 million. The problem there was that some 40% of those people were already registered. One thing we have not done today is given enough credit to both the Public Bill Office here in the House of Lords, for the speed with which it has drafted and ordered our amendments, and the day-to-day work of returning officers around the country. I shall return to this subject at a later point, but those officers do a phenomenal job. If you have 2.8 million extra people registering to vote during an election, as I say, that seems to show it is not that difficult to do it—and, by the way, if all those students who are moving off to university are unable to go on to a website, I have a serious doubt about whether some of them should be at university in the first place.

The 40% of people who registered at the last election who were double-registered imposed an enormous burden on the returning officers. I have said over and over again that we should move to a read-only access process. In other words, if Robert Hayward wants to check whether he is on the electoral roll, he just goes on the website with his password and can check that he is there. Instead of that, because Governments of all persuasions have refused to introduce a read-only system, we impose a burden on returning officers which is unacceptable at the time of an election, when they are trying to administer all sorts of other things.

It is not difficult. We have been told by government and officials over and over again that it is an expensive and difficult process. Is it? Local authorities—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My noble friend has correctly highlighted how the process actually works if you go on the Government’s website, and so many of the district councils or other local councils which are registration authorities have their own skin in that same machine. When you type in your name, date of birth and national insurance number, the system goes automatically to HMRC and the DWP to validate you before you have even pressed the button; they will validate you almost immediately. I think the point my noble friend is making, which is absolutely correct, is that having this unique identifier—the national insurance number or some other method that might be defined by regulations—gives an absolutely unambiguous way of determining whether you have a duplication.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his intervention, which was slightly longer than I had hoped for, since I want to keep to my time. As I say, there is a system; we were told it is impossible, but what have the Northern Irish done? They introduced a read-only system and have done that themselves. It operates effectively in Northern Ireland without any problem.

These massive changes are, I believe, unnecessary—although, yes, they were advertised—and without great benefit. I will quote now from the impact assessment, to which I may return on another occasion. On page 113 it says that

“we assume that the completeness of registers will increase by 3 percentage points (from 85.9% to 88.9%) by the end of the 10-year … period”.

Are we going through all these changes for that?

In conclusion, I must pick up the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, on his comments about my support for automatic registration. I believed that I had made it absolutely clear that I support it for attainers, whatever age they may happen to be, because I want to introduce them to the democratic system. Thereafter, I do not support automatic registration for that very small gain.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I would be more than happy to do that.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, it is late, so I will be brief, especially as the new guidance in the Companion tells me to be so. I was confused by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard; he first stood up to excoriate me and then his Amendment 50 proposed something like the same. Nevertheless, there are no hard feelings, which is why I have moved towards him, because I sense that we are as one on the national insurance issue.

I am concerned by the Minister’s winding, because it has become clear for the first time that so much of the foundations of the democracy that our society depends on is to be left to secondary legislation: “Don’t worry, it’s going to be all right”. I heard no reassurance from the Dispatch Box on how we will deal with the 14 and 15 year-old attainers, although I listened carefully to what he said about everybody else. He is placing impossible burdens on the electoral registration officers.

I suggest that that the Minister needs to spend time not only with those officers but possibly with some of the participants in this debate. It is clear—I am in danger of sounding like the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—that no consideration was given to this in the other place, and this is the House of Lords at its best.

I am really concerned about all the unintended consequences here, whether it be with regard to identification, as my noble friend Lord Jackson said, or on immigration status. I am concerned about the number of duplicates and the different spellings of the name O’Neill, for example—and is that one L or two? What is the role of the Electoral Commission? We will deal with some of these issues. Ultimately, however, we need to be concerned about the integrity of the register.

I hope that the Minister will commit here and now to having follow-up meetings on a cross-party basis with those who have participated in this debate so that we can thrash this out. What we have had up until now is a recipe for disaster on Report unless more clarification is given. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.