Electoral Administration Bill

Perhaps, and if this House does not require that a league table be drawn up, someone doubtless soon will; perhaps my hon. Friend will have another job to do in that regard. Local council committees can scrutinise such reports annually, and it might not be a bad idea for the commission—should it be given this responsibility—to produce an annual report for Parliament, so that we can scrutinise how well it has performed overall. On safeguards and scrutiny, our Select Committee hearing examined the idea of using of a variety of databases. In general, data protection experts had no problem with that, so long as it is made clear that the information collected can be used for this purpose. I am certainly prepared to listen to what my colleagues on the Government Front Bench have to say. The wording of my amendment may not be perfect, but I hope that they at least accept the thrust of the idea that we should make it clear that EROs have the right to access not merely information held by a council—it is clear that they already access council tax and benefits information, for example—but wider information. Let us consider a classic case. Local authorities used to have housing departments, whose information could be used by EROs. Housing departments as we traditionally understand them no longer exist, because stock transfers have taken place or arm’s length management organisations have been created, as in the case of my Sheffield authority. It is not clear whether EROs have the right to seek information outside the council from arm’s length, or completely separate and independent, bodies. It would clearly be wrong if the information historically used by EROs were suddenly removed as the result of a housing stock transfer.