Electoral Administration Bill

The hon. Gentleman may well know his place, but many people cannot readily bring to mind their national insurance number. For example, many women in the ethnic minority community will never have used their national insurance number, are not familiar with it and would not be able to produce it. Given that they are a key part of the community that we seek to reach to increase registration, it would be perverse to put a barrier that they would find almost insurmountable in their way. There are other problems with using national insurance numbers. For a start, they are not unique. They are supposed to be unique, but the same number is sometimes unfortunately issued to more than one person. They also persist after death. That may be a macabre way to put it, but national insurance numbers still exist for people who are sadly no longer with us. Therefore, they might provide an opportunity for electoral fraud that did not previously exist. Nor are national insurance numbers entirely personal, because they are held in personnel departments or in employers’ records. It would not be difficult for someone who wished to perpetrate a widespread fraud to collect a significant number of national insurance numbers by looking at employment records. For all those reasons, I do not think that national insurance numbers are the right personal identifiers to use, but we need to use something. In a few moments, we shall debate pilot schemes. I am not convinced by them, but I do not want to pre-empt that debate. We need something to use now that goes a little further than the Government are presently prepared to accept, and we may wish to look closely at the transitional arrangements that the Electoral Commission put before the Committee so ably chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) as proposals around which we can coalesce. It is better to arrive at a consensus than to proceed on a partisan basis. That solution may commend itself to the Government in due course. I would prefer us to reach that consensus in this elected Chamber, especially on a matter that relates to the conduct of elections, than for it to be reached in the non-elected House with only limited opportunity for us to discuss it. I ask the Minister to consider seriously and give us at least a glimmer of an indication whether the proposal from the Electoral Commission—the so-called transitional process, which was mentioned earlier—might be acceptable. If so, by far the best solution would be for the Government to put it into their own words and bring it forward as an amendment on Report. I have no doubt that it would receive support from both sides of the House. Otherwise, we would have to keep on arguing the toss about something on which we should be able to reach a consensus, and that would be unfortunate.