A Question Of Identity

In this week's Queen's Speech, Her Majesty announced that her Government (and I suspect that she would rather they were not her Government), intended to introduce legislation that would require voters to produce photographic ID at Polling Stations in order to vote at general elections and English local elections. Predictably, this provoked much opposition on the twin grounds that it was a “blatant attempt by the Tories to rig the result of the next general election," (Cat Smith, Shadow Minister for Voter Engagement and Youth Affairs), and that it would disenfranchise thousands of people, because, as Darren Hughes of the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), said “these plans will leave tens of thousands of legitimate voters voiceless”.

According to The Independent, a Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: "Electoral fraud is an unacceptable crime that strikes at a core principle of our democracy." But, isn't potentially disenfranchising thousands of people even more of a threat to democracy? The answer really depends on how much of a problem electoral fraud actually is. Personation - that is 'assuming the identity of another (person) in order to deceive' - at the ballot box is extremely rare; during 2017 there were 336 cases of alleged electoral fraud and only one of those was for personation at a Polling Station, while there were two for a similar offence relating to postal votes. While the majority of alleged offenses resulted in no action being taken, in 165 cases where action was necessary, these were all alleged campaign frauds, and nothing do do with voters.

Cynics might say that these low numbers do not prove that there is little or no electoral fraud, as there are (obviously) no numbers for how many frauds have been successful and undetected. The Metropolitan Police's much criticised investigation into electoral fraud in Tower Hamlets in 2014, following which former mayor Luftur Rahman was found guilty of corrupt and illegal practices, suggests that we should take these figures as advisory rather than absolute. Nonetheless, they do imply that the scale of the problem is minuscule and that the Government's proposals are taking the proverbial sledgehammer to a microscopic nut.

One might imagine that assessing the scale of the problem vis a vis voters potentially disenfranchised by requiring them to produce photo ID at Polling Stations would be difficult, but it is actually easier than one might imagine. In 2015, the Electoral Commission said that about 3.5 million electors did not have an acceptable form of photo ID, and in May this year, a trial at local elections in ten areas across the country where voters were required to produce photo ID found that 819 people were turned away from Polling Stations for a lack of such ID. None of the 819 subsequently returned to vote. The net result is that in a limited number of constituencies, at one election, the number of people unable to vote for lack of photo ID was more than double the number of cases of electoral fraud in the whole of 2017, and more than 270 times the number of instances of personation in that year.

It's not compulsory to take a dog to a Polling Station...

 

...but in Northern Ireland you need one of these, or something similar.

On the face of it, those numbers suggest that requiring voters to produce photo ID - especially when so many people have none - is deeply undemocratic since the risk of fraud is so greatly outweighed by the risk of disenfranchisement. To mitigate that risk, however there are proposals that anyone lacking photographic ID would be able to apply for a free document proving their identity. This is already the case in Northern Ireland, where along with the usual form of photo ID that can be used - passport, driving licence, bus or rail pass, among others - the local Electoral Office issues an electoral identity card, which serves the dual purpose of authenticating voters and providing proof of age when the holder wishes to buy age restricted products such as alcohol and tobacco. This scheme was introduced in 2002 and has improved public confidence in the electoral process and reduced instances of suspected electoral fraud. The number of registered voters in Northern Ireland declined in 2002, with the number of voters turned away because someone had already voted in their name, and of people voting under more than one name both falling. This certainly suggests that requiring photo ID reduces risk of fraud, but that may only be because the instances of fraud were higher in Northern Ireland than those on the mainland in the first place.

Compulsory - or even voluntary - identity cards are something that, in general, the British public views with some suspicion. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 proposed a national identity card that would serve as a personal identification document and European Union travel document. There were objections on the grounds of cost, effectiveness, and data protection. Given the amount of data that would have been harvested and subsequently stored in the associated National Identity Register (NIR), and especially in view of successive government's track record on major IT projects, these concerns were probably well-founded. The scheme died a slow death and the Identity Cards Act was repealed in 2010 and the NIR database destroyed.

While photo ID may not be compulsory in the UK (yet), life without it can be inconvenient at best. If you want to rent a flat, apply for a job, open a bank account, or take a domestic flight, you'll need photo ID, and apart from buying an alcoholic drink, many pubs and most clubs now want photo ID just to get through the door.  And, if like me, you want to go to the BBC to see a radio show recorded, you'll need photo ID for that too.

In England and Wales, 76% of the population hold a passport.

If - and it's a big if, given the fact that we currently have a minority Government and a General Election within the coming months is quite probable - legislation passes to require voter ID, I would seriously hope that all of the 3.5 million people lacking such ID apply immediately for whatever state-issued ID the Government proposes, and for two reasons. Firstly - and obviously - to prevent those people from being disenfranchised, and thereby allay fears of any future election being 'rigged' (beyond the not unreasonable concern that campaign methods might be achieving that outcome anyway, although that is a whole different bouilloire de poisson), and secondly to watch the carnage as an under-prepared government department using an inadequate IT system goes into complete meltdown trying to cope with a tsunami of applications.

Communication Breakdown

In the 1980s, while I was working at Midland Bank in Barking, if the telephone wasn't answered within three or four rings, one of the managers would bellow, "Telephone!" and the call would be picked up immediately. In those days customers could actually ring the bank branch where they held their account and speak to someone whom they had quite probably met face to face at the counter at some time or another. They might have had to call on a landline from their home, or work, or a call box, but aside from the occasions when the lines were engaged, the chances were good that within a few minutes of placing their call, the customer would have had whatever it was they were calling about dealt with.

Today, this seems positively quaint, because although the channels of communication have improved since the 1980s, with phone calls now possible from anywhere thanks to the ubiquitous mobile phone, and with other methods of contact such as online chat being introduced, actual communication has broken down and become poorer in my opinion. Instead of the customer calling their branch and speaking to someone who knew them, their business and their account as was the case thirty-odd years ago, customers now have to navigate interminable menu trees, and identify themselves by whatever method their bank employs before being able to talk to a call handler. In these days of identity theft, the need for a bank - or any other organisation - to be certain they are speaking to the right person is of paramount importance, of course. In the 1980s, methods of identifying customers who called were much more informal, and we would often do so simply because we recognised the voices of frequent callers, but I never heard of a case of someone calling and impersonating a customer. Although the phrase 'identity theft' seems to have first been coined in the 1960s, it wasn't even thought of as a problem until recently.

Having held on the phone for a period of time much greater than my manager back in the 1980s would have tolerated, today's bank customers will end up speaking to someone who is not only not in their branch, but are probably not even on the same continent. And the person at the other end of the line in whichever bank's call centre it is will never have spoken to the customer before, far less met them in person. Chances are, customer and bank staff will never speak to one another again. Which is just part of the problem. Who among us have not rung a bank, insurance company, or energy provider and having taken the name of the person at the other end of the line, and wanting to speak to them again, either because they have provided good service and we would like to have them help us again, or because we have a supplementary question, been thwarted in our attempts to contact that person and had to go through the disheartening business of explaining our problem once again, this time to someone else?

It seems that in many cases organisations are actively placing barriers between themselves and their customers. It isn't uncommon to head to a website, click on the Contact Us option and be presented with the options to email or use some sort of messaging facility, but find no telephone number. Amazon's website doesn't even have a Contact Us option that I can find on the home page, although it can be found - eventually - through their Help page, and if you want to speak to them, there is no number to call, just the option to ask them to call you. The impression is that they really, really, don't want to talk to you.

I had to use Fitbit's Live Chat facility a few months back, and as is the case on more than one occasion when I've used these sorts of services, I got the impression that I was chatting with a bot. While I am sure that this is fairly common these days, the experience was vaguely unnerving and not really very satisfactory. By the by, I have noticed that no matter how unhelpful or generally useless people (or bots) have been in a chat or telephone conversation, they invariably ask, "Is there anything else I can help you with today?" at the end of the conversation. I am often tempted to point out that they haven't helped me with my initial problem, so in answer to that question, probably not.

The barriers that organisations erect between themselves and their customers mean that many people, even when they have a complaint, simply give up and move on. The cynic in me says that this could easily be a deliberate policy that drives down complaint volumes and when an organisation's key performance indicators are published, low volumes of queries and complaints can be proudly cited as demonstrating how well the company is doing, even though this is not strictly the case.

In the last few months it has been my unfortunate experience to have to contact one particular bank, and various agencies such as the Royal Mail, Citizens Advice, Action Fraud, Trading Standards, and the police. I won't go into the reasons here, as the matter is ongoing, although I can say that this doesn't relate to something that has happened to me, but to someone else on whose behalf I have been acting. I have spent hours on the phone to people - mostly on hold - with a 90 minute wait to 101, the police's non-emergency line particularly frustrating, especially when at the end of it, I was told to contact Action Fraud. And no one, but no one ever calls back (with the honourable exception of the police, although even they needed some cajoling). Trying to obtain a simple letter from the bank took four phone calls over a period of six weeks, despite having been promised at least three times that it had been sent. The Royal Mail turned the simple task of delivering a special delivery letter into a complete farce, by mis-delivering the first one to the sender and not the addressee, and then taking weeks to return it once the addressee had refused to accept it, and that despite claiming that, had it been returned, we would have had it back by the time I had to have a long, and very unsatisfactory telephone conversation with them in an attempt to locate the missing letter.

According to Citizens Advice, Trading Standards do not, under any circumstances, provide feedback, and neither do Action Fraud. It seems that communication with these organisations is purely one way, so the public can have absolutely no confidence whatever that they are actually doing anything after a matter has been raised with them. The Times ran an expose of Action Fraud recently (August 2019), in which they revealed that "staff had been trained to mislead victims into thinking their cases would be investigated even though most were never looked at again," and this - together with the impression I got from speaking with the police that Action Fraud are not held in very high regard by them - reinforces my belief that organisations actively impede the public in their attempts to make complaints, or even to simply communicate with them.

Technology has moved on a-pace since my days at Midland Bank in Barking, but whereas it should have made communication between organisations and their customers easier, along with the resolution of complaints and queries, it seems that the reverse is actually true. From experience, it seems that the poor old customer is all too often on their own as the agencies they ought to be able to depend on are either indifferent to their problems or incompetent in dealing with them. The last thirty years might have seen progress, but not necessarily any improvement.