Electoral Administration Bill

I do not intend to speak at length on this group of amendments. However, clause 70 does not apply to Northern Ireland. The Electoral Commission says that the Government intend to introduce legislation for Northern Ireland to deal with some of the problems that that entails, but it is essential that that legislation reproduce the propositions in clause 9. I wholeheartedly endorse the standards that the Government are attempting to apply to electoral officers in clause 9. If that standard had been included in legislation affecting Northern Ireland in the past few years, when electoral law was tested on us before it was tested on the rest of the nation, the number of people falling off the register would have been very different. Will the Government confirm that clause 9 will be replicated in the Northern Ireland legislation that is to follow? Can they tell us whether that legislation will be introduced soon, because it would be wrong to head into a general election without all parts of the United Kingdom having the same standards of registration? Hon. Members have referred to the Northern Ireland experience, and the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) is right to say that the issues that impact on GB are not entirely the same as the issues that impact on Northern Ireland. He said that there is a crisis of under-registration in Great Britain, but in Northern Ireland there was a crisis of over-registration.