Constitution Unit Conference 2026: The Representation of the People Bill

Thank you very much, Alan, and thank you for the opportunity to come along today.

Uh, the Representation of the People Bill has the scope and the potential to make several really important improvements to our electoral system.

I'd like in these remarks to highlight two.

The first is around participation, and the second is around resilience.

So in terms of participation, um, the bill paves the way for automatic, automated voter registration, so we end the scandal of eight million people either being completely missing from the electoral register or incorrectly registered, and therefore being deprived of the opportunity to vote.

That change will make a huge difference, particularly to those people who are more likely to be in a group that don't get registered at the moment.

That's especially young people and people who move house frequently, especially people living in private rented accommodation.

But also people with certain disabilities and, and other groups are kind of particularly disadvantaged by the system that we currently have.

The bill will give the opportunity to improve that.

Uh, the bill also includes the, the provision for votes at 16, and one of the opportunities that votes at 16 will give will be to dramatically improve the chance to enroll young people early in the practice, the habit of voting.

And we know once you get the habit of voting, you're more likely to keep it.

And if we couple votes at 16 with significant improvements in democratic education, and those improvements really are needed, but the government has signaled the intention to, to make that change as well, then we have the opportunity to bring a whole new generation of, uh, of youngsters into the habit of voting and into full participation in democracy.

So the partition bene- participation benefits, we think, are really important.

In terms of resilience, um, the electoral system is part of our critical national infrastructure, and we need to invest in it accordingly, and we haven't done in the past.

It's been something that's been seen as just another bit of administration, and we need to give it the toughness to cope with the fact that there are many people out there who want to undermine our democracy and see it fail, particularly actors abroad, but there are others too who are trying to undermine what we're, what we're seeking to, to do here, undermine our way of life.

We start from a position where there is high public confidence in the ri- smooth running of elections.

But there are storm clouds out there, and we'll hear from Philip Rycroft shortly.

His, um, report, which we hope the bill will implement in full, will close a whole range of loopholes, particularly that allow foreign money into politics, but also generally toughen up the system and make it fit for the kind of challenges it will face in the future.

So participation and resilience, I think, are key benefits of the bill.

However, you also wanted to, to highlight things that won't necessarily be fixed by the bill but need to be fixed.

So the first risk of the bill is the timetable for implementation.

The clock is ticking while the bill is going through Parliament, and yet primary legislation is only the first of several stages that need to be c-completed properly if the bill's intentions are to be realized.

So there'll be a significant amount of secondary legislation, there'll be significant amounts of guidance, but most important of all, political parties, campaigners, and particularly electoral administrators, will have an awful lot of preparations to do that will require new computer systems, new procurements, training for staff.

All of those need to be in place well before, um, an election that is intended to, um, implement the, the bill comes to, comes to pass.

And I'm particularly thinking here about the next general election for the UK.