RIGHT OF A VOLUNTARY PATIENT TO REGISTER (Hansard, 14 February 1985)

§ Mr. Stern
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The subject matter of the new clause has been raised in the House on several occasions, the most recent being when we debated the Mental Health (Amendment) Bill on Report on 18 October 1982. The wording, however, dates back to the Speaker's Conference of 1973–74, which recommended on 25 October 1973 that the Representation of the People Act 1949 be amended so that it ceased to exclude registration in respect of residence of patients at mental hospitals … in that all patients in general hospitals … can be so registered … to place patients in mental hospitals on the same footing as those in general hospitals. But the difference that I am describing goes back to 1918 and the Representation of the People Act of that year, which provided that those in a lunatic asylum, workhouse, poorhouse or any similar institution should not be treated as resident there for electoral purposes. It was the view of the Home Office in 1973 that that provision was based on the concept that a recipient of charity could not be regarded as sufficiently independent to vote.
The present position dates from 1948. In the Representation of the People Act 1949, the case for excluding registration in respect of residents of mental hospitals was based on the assumption that patients in such hospitals might resent their presence in such hospitals being made public.
Those arguments seem to have gone by the board, and the principal argument adduced by the Home Office when it came to arguing against the franchise to voluntary patients at the time of the 1973 Speaker's Conference was that mental hospitals drew their patients from a wider catchment area than other hospitals and that the result of a poll could be materially affected by patients not otherwise identified with the locality.
That argument was used by the Minister in the debate in 1982 to which I referred, when he said: Many psychiatric hospitals are of a considerable size—a thousand beds and more. If patients were given the right to vote in the area where the hospital is situated, this could lead to a 599 sudden large increase in the electorate in that area. This is naturally viewed with apprehension by local communities. Mental patients will inevitably be to some extent isolated from day-to-day life. We cannot expect them to take a full part in local affairs. Yet the votes of a thousand or so patients could exercise a disproportionate influence, particularly at local elections. The right to cast them could cause resentment in a field where all want to see fears broken down and not exacerbated." — [Official Report, 18 October 1982; Vol. 29, c. 178.] That argument—which can be summed up by the word "swamping"; the fear that the votes from a mental hospital would be of undue significance in terms of a local or general election—has been proved to be unnecessary on two grounds.
It was argued by the Minister in 1982 that the registration of mental patients in the hospitals in which they lived would be inappropriate because they could not play a full part in local affairs. I shall deal with that argument later.
The Minister argued also that mental patients would swamp the electorate in the area in which the mental hospital was situated. Since the 1982 Act, the reverse has occurred. I am indebted to two officials of MIND, David Brandon and William Bingley, for research not in my area of the south-west—that has proved too difficult—but in the north-west. They have monitored the effect of the changes in the 1982 Act which were designed to make it easier for voluntary patients to register to vote. By 1984, when the Act was well known and fully effective, of a total of 4,881 voluntary patients in 11 hospitals in the north-west 251 patients had registered to vote under provisions which were designed, according to the Minister, to give voluntary patients a greatly increased opportunity to vote.
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It could he argued that the low rate of registration was caused by the fact that the majority of patients in those hospitals were incapable of voting under the voting test established in the 1982 Act. On looking at the most capable patients—called the Wessex category 1 patients — who are most likely to be going out into the community under the policy of care in the community one finds that, of a total of 614 such patients in the north-west, only 170 had registered to vote.
It is clear that swamping, the ability of potential voters in a mental hospital to control the local electorate, is not happening and was never going to happen, because the number of people from a mental hospital who vote is tiny in proportion to the total population of that hospital. It is clear also that there are other obstacles to a capable person who is a voluntary patient registering to vote. Two obstacles are placed in the way of a long-term, long-stay voluntary patient before he can exercise his vote. The first is the voting test which was set up by the Mental Health (Amendment) Act 1982. I do not propose in this new clause any change in the voting test, despite the fact that the principle of a voting test is abhorrent to many people. The 1982 voting test was a new provision which has not yet been given sufficient time to ascertain how it operates.
The second obstacle is residence. The Government's intention, as set out in the debate on the 1982 legislation, was clear. It is equally clear that what the Government intended has not happened. The Government said: The declaration will specify the address outside the hospital at which the patient is to be registered as an elector. Normally this would be the patient's home address, the address of his family, but patients who have no home address will be able to declare an address at which they were resident before admission or, if necessary, they will be able to declare the address to which 600 they expect to be discharged … We have deliberately drawn the provision widely enough to ensure that no voluntary patient will be deprived of a vote because he cannot supply an address."—[Official Report, 18 October 1982; Vol. 29, c. 179.] With the greatest respect to the then Minister, subsequent events have proved that that provision was not drawn nearly widely enough. The figures that I have just quoted make it clear that it is the residence provision—the fiction that a hospital in which someone has lived for 30 or 40 years is not his residence—that prevents a considerable number of people from registering to vote.
Residence is a fact. In the debate on new clause 2, the Minister said—I was not asleep throughout the whole debate—that residence implies a substantial degree of permanence. Is residence in a hospital for 30 or 40 years not permanent enough for him?
In our electoral legislation, we rightly tie representation to residence. In this one area, we untie the link. One class of potential voters are not entitled to vote where they reside. We create the fiction that there is somewhere else where they should be entitled to vote, if they choose to take up the option to do so.
I recently held surgeries or advice centres in the two hospitals for the mentally handicapped in my constituency. Not surprisingly, I found that the voluntary patients were bringing to me perfectly normal problems. Their problems were such as we hear about in our surgeries every day—problems about local transport and worries about what they read in the newspapers and about local employment opportunities. But half way through the surgery, it suddenly occurred to me that I was probably breaking every parliamentary rule that exists because, if the people talking to me had registered to vote, they were undoubtedly the constituents of any hon. Member other than myself.

§ Mr. Campbell-Savours
The hon. Gentleman is not breaking a parliamentary rule. He is breaking a parliamentary custom. There is a difference.

§ Mr. Stern
I am delighted to accept that correction, but some of us do not even like to break parliamentary customs.
Some of those people might only be entitled to register to vote in a constituency perhaps 300 miles away where they might have lived 30 or 40 years earlier. They could not take any of their problems to their hon. Member or to their theoretical local council.
As I have said, the then Minister said of such patients in the 1982 debate that We cannot expect them to take a full part in local affairs."—[Official Report, 18 October 1982; Vol. 29, c. 178.] Perhaps that is not surprising when they have no opportunity to play their part. [Interruption.] When they wish to make known their opinions about local transport services, whether public or private, it is to the local Member of Parliament that they should be able to turn. When they want to express an opinion about social services in the hospital or to bring pressure to bear on local training centre provision, it is their local Member of Parliament on whom they will wish to rely. They will want to rely on their local Member of Parliament for these and other grievances.
There is another, specific anomaly. According to the 1973 Speaker's Conference: the disqualification rests on the actual residence, if they have a home address outside the hospital. If I go for a long stay into a normal hospital and I have a private address, then I can vote 601 by virtue of having a private address. If my home has to be sold up and I am in this hospital I can then give the hospital address as my address, and this will be accepted for voting purposes. If I go into a mental hospital and I have a home address, I can still vote by virtue of having a home address. If my home is sold up I can not then give the hospital as my address for voting purposes. As long as that remains the case, discrimination against voluntary and long-stay patients in mental hospitals will remain an issue.
This is genuine discrimination against people who are entitled to vote as anyone else but who are asked to jump over special hurdles to be able to exercise their vote. They are a small number of people who can already be forced to pass the voting test and who have often been in hospital long enough genuinely to be able to claim that it is their residence. Under existing legislation, however, they are denied the vote. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to think again and to accept new clause 15.

§ Mr. Mellor
My hon. Friend has made an interesting speech on a matter about which I know he feels strongly. I shall try to reply in the same spirit. The present arrangements by which voluntary patients at mental hospitals are permitted to register as electors and vote were introduced by the Mental Health (Amendment) Act 1982. That was a substantial step forward, which we might have hoped would settle the matter for some time.
My hon. Friend will know from his careful research—he was not an hon. Member at that time—that the Standing Committee on the Bill introduced a provision, against Government advice, allowing such patients to be included in the register for their hospital address in the usual way. When the matter came back to the House, there was substantial objection to that proposal, but the spirit of the Committee's proposal was accepted by giving voluntary mental hospital patients the right to register as electors, but only in respect of an address other than the hospital. That is how the matter was left in the Representation of the People Act 1983.
I do not know whether the reason why so few people have registered has to do with the qualifications for registration and the tests that have been set, or with the qualifying address. I am not persuaded that it has anything to do with the qualifying address, because servicemen register on the same basis. Some of them may have been away for some time from the address at which they notionally register. My hon. Friend may tell the organisations which are pressing the issue and which are in contact with him that I am doubtful whether the spirit of the Committee is with him in seeking to reopen matters that after exhaustive consideration were resolved as recently as 1982. Although he is fully entitled to put down a marker, as he has done, I am not sure that there is significant support for the proposed change. Although I understand the sincerity of his views, I am afraid that I must advise my right hon. and hon. Friends to resist the new clause.

§ Mr. Stern
I remind my right hon. Friend the Minister that the recommendation by the Speaker's Conference in 1973 of this change was unanimous. Therefore, I hope that he does not believe that the debate in 1982, which was admitted to have resulted in a compromise, has settled the 602 issue for all time I expect that it will be raised again and again until what I see as an injustice is corrected. In view of my hon. Friend's comments and what he says about an apparent lack of support in the Committee, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.