Electoral Administration Bill

Under the provisions of the Bill, strengthened by an Opposition amendment, the Electoral Commission must issue guidance which must be accepted by electoral registration officers, who must put their electoral register online and feed through the data in a certain way to go on to the co-ordinated online register of electors. The system is not voluntary. We expect it to proceed as laid down in the Bill. We regard it as not just desirable, but necessary. We recently published a consultation paper on CORE which provides more information on this, for Members who are interested. If the proposal goes forward, a national insurance number or other personal identifier may be of use. That is why we have included order-making powers in clauses 14 and 15 to allow for the possibility of other identifiers being piloted and rolled out in the future. However, at present we do not see a use for national insurance numbers in electoral registration outside Northern Ireland, and believe that collecting them would discourage people from registering to vote. The personal identifiers that we propose collecting in the pilots—signatures and dates of birth—are simple and easily memorable. A national insurance number is more complicated and we believe that at this stage its use would be disproportionate. New clause 1 and amendments Nos. 1 and 6 to 14 tabled by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) seek to give effect to a system of voluntary personal identifiers, as mooted by the Electoral Commission. I am afraid colleagues will have to concentrate extremely hard. Once they have worked out the differences between the Opposition and the Government on personal identifiers, they will have to deal with a third issue: what is the difference between us, the Opposition and the Electoral Commission proposal, which is put forward in his amendment by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome? Under the system that he proposes, all electors would be able to supply their signature and date of birth on the annual canvass form—there would be a space for that—but they would not be compelled to do so. In my view, this lack of compulsion, instead of the pilots for compulsion, is a real weakness. It means that security will be enhanced only if people voluntarily choose to collect signatures for everybody in their household on the canvass form and list everybody’s date of birth. There appears to be no benefit from that. It is supposedly helping security, but it is voluntary. Even people who do not do it can go on the register. What benefit is there for security if the system is only voluntary?