Electoral Administration Bill

We certainly ought to increase the overall level of registration, but I do not accept that we need pilots for what is a rather simple concept: whether people sign and provide a personal identifier before getting the vote. This is not a complicated issue on which we need to take a huge amount of evidence. Were we to opt for complex personal identifiers that people could not reasonably be expected to have in their mind, there would be an argument for trialling them. I point out to the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) that this is an urgent issue. If we pursue the Government’s suggested pilot scheme, which will inevitably take time to evaluate, we will get to another general election without proper measures in place to prevent postal ballot fraud. To do that would be to serve democracy and the people of this country very ill indeed.