Electoral Administration Bill

But earlier the hon. Gentleman described exactly what the barriers are. Which personal identifiers will be easiest? That is probably where we are looking to pilot. Should we use date of birth? I would go along with that; it is probably an easy identifier. Should we use a signature? Most certainly it would be easy for most people, but we might use the mother’s maiden name or a range of other things that will be easier for an individual to remember than things that we might think are easy to remember. That is why I said in a previous intervention that using the national insurance number might be difficult. Remember, the purpose of this measure is to encourage more and more people to register. For people with a learning disability, for instance, something we have not thought of might be an easier personal identifier than the ones we have come up with. I also referred earlier to the point made by Scope, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People and the Royal National Institute of the Blind, as well as other disabled organisations: whether it would be more successful to have individual registration with identifiers or household registration, also with identifiers; whether distributing the forms by household would make them too complex, too difficult to read and too difficult to access; and whether using an individual form would lead to a huge drop in the number of people who register. Nothing I have heard during our debates makes me think that we have the answers to those questions, which is why we need a pilot. On Second Reading, I also made a plea for consistency across the different electoral regions. I might seem to be contradicting myself, but I think that we need pilots to find out what is easy and what is accessible. Having been registered in more than one electoral district—indeed, for a short time I was registered in three—I know that the variety of information and the differences between information that one receives in different areas can make it either easier or more difficult to work out how to register and what the form says. I have puzzled over the exact meaning of a number of forms, especially in relation to declaration of citizenship, as it is not always clear whether that is mandatory. In one electoral register, one must declare one’s nationality, while in my home register in Aberdeen, one does not have to do so. There is still confusion about exactly what is needed, and that is why the Government are right to pursue pilots. I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome that the pilots must ultimately come up with a final solution. I hope that, as a result of the pilots, we will find out what works, what does not work, what is easy, what is accessible, and above all, what leads to security of poll and cuts out fraud to make sure that everyone has confidence in the electoral system.