Local elections voter ID trial 'like picking up parcel'

Local elections: Photo ID needed at some polling stations

Ministers have defended next month's voter ID trial, comparing it with "picking up a parcel from the post office".

Voters in Woking, Gosport, Bromley, Watford and Swindon will be asked to show ID in the 3 May local elections before being given a ballot paper.

Labour said the measures could "disenfranchise legitimate voters".

But minister Chloe Smith said the pilots - aimed at curbing voter fraud - were "proportionate and reasonable".

She said people deserved to have "confidence in our democracy" and that the government already asked for ID in buying a car, collecting benefits or getting a parcel from the post office.

When ID requirements had been introduced in Northern Ireland, she said, there had been "no evidence to suggest a fall in turnout", adding that electoral fraud had "dropped sharply".

Some campaigners have criticised the plans - the Electoral Reform Society has said the problem of voter fraud is "tiny" and described the ID pilot as "unnecessary and overbearing".

Last month the society organised a letter from campaigners, warning the plans "present a significant barrier to democratic engagement and risk compromising a basic human right for some of the most marginalised groups in society".

Asking an urgent question in the House of Commons, Labour's shadow voter engagement minister, Cat Smith, asked ministers whether they had assessed if anyone from the Windrush generation would be denied their right to vote.

"It is the same hostile environment all over again, shutting our fellow citizens out of public life," she said, referring to Caribbean migrants who settled in the UK between 1948 and 1971 - some of whom have been threatened with deportation, have lost their jobs or been refused access to medical treatment arising from changes to immigration rules since 2014.

"We cannot allow this government to pilot discriminatory measures that could disenfranchise legitimate voters who already face a multitude of barriers to democratic engagement," Ms Smith said, urging the government to drop the plans.

But Conservative MP Bob Neill said the urgent question was a "wholly bogus attempt by the opposition to discredit a sensible pilot".