Electoral Administration Bill

The hon. Gentleman will find that other measures give electoral registration officers the powers and resources with which they can try to ensure that as many people as possible are aware of their right to register for, and participate in, elections. A line must be drawn when an attempt to encourage people to register and participate shaves into political considerations. However, the Bill does a good job by drawing the line in the right place. I did not want to comment on amendment No. 14 in any great detail. I hope that the Minister will treat it in the way in which the Opposition intended. We should remind electoral registration officers of their duty to ensure that they maintain an accurate register and I hope that that duty will be encapsulated in the final version of clause 9. However, that duty is not the essence of what the clause is about. The amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe go to the heart of the concerns that many hon. Members have expressed. Clause 9 simply requires registration officers to maintain the register. We must, of course, ensure that the register is accurate and that people who wish to be placed on it may do so, but a greater sense of urgency and priority is needed, so we should encourage officers to maximise the numbers on the register, which would be the effect of amendment No. 30. Although the wording of that amendment might not be acceptable to the Minister, I hope that she will take on board the sprit in which it was tabled and the support that I suspect it would receive among hon. Members. I am pleased that amendments Nos. 28 and 29 have been tabled because the question of data sharing goes to the heart of what we can do to try to maximise the number of people on the register. I have talked to my electoral registration officer at great length about what can be achieved by knocking on doors and sending letters. It is extremely difficult to boost the number of people on the register by using simply those mechanisms. We need information from data sources so that we can target the people who are not on the register more effectively. I accept that there might be data protection problems with that. Additionally, we should not set up a mechanism that would overload electoral registration officers because they can do only a certain amount of work with the limited resources available to them.