Electoral Administration Bill

I said at the outset that our motivation was to ensure that everybody entitled to vote was on the register. We talked about socially excluded groups—poor people, people living on council estates and new Commonwealth citizens—but there is a great deal of concern on both sides of the Committee in relation to service personnel. I recognise that, on Second Reading, there was what I would describe as zero tolerance for any service personnel not being on the register. I sense that hon. Members feel not only that it is important that those who serve our country in the armed forces should be on the register, but are slightly baffled as to how it is that people can be recruited, employed and engaged in the armed forces but somehow we cannot get the rocket science working to register them. This problem requires us to deal with the electoral system, but also with how the armed forces are organised, on which many hon. Members will be more expert than me. My ministerial colleagues in the MOD are more expert than me and this important issue is of concern to them. We have met the Electoral Commission with MOD colleagues and are considering actively how we make absolutely sure that we do not have another attempt to improve the situation that does not work. We do not want to move from one problem to another and I do not think that returning to the status quo ante of 2000 is a good idea. We accept many of the hon. Gentleman’s criticisms of the current scheme. It was changed because it was characterised both by low registration rates—albeit probably not as low as the present rates—and by inaccurate registers that were wrongly inflated in certain areas. There was a problem that we needed to address. We might have made it worse; we are trying to make it better.