Electoral Administration Bill

As usual, my hon. Friend gets right to the nub of the issue. This is totally inconsistent. The document about the central online register of electors to which the Minister referred raises the possibility of ID cards being used as a database to check these very matters. There is obviously a great deal of inconsistency here. The Electoral Commission has not accepted my full proposal involving national insurance numbers, dates of birth and signatures, but it has said that it would be right to use a signature and a date of birth. Ministers have said no to that, however. They can assess the mood in the country on the issue, and they are saying that it needs to be tackled as matter of urgency with a national solution. They have therefore come up with a transitional scheme, which would provide for voluntary registration using a signature and a date of birth. If people wished to apply for a postal vote, they would have to make the same information available. That does not go as far as we would wish. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome has tabled a new clause on this matter and will explain his proposals in more detail. It seems wrong that the Minister is not even prepared to go so far as to accept our fairly anodyne compromise measure. The Electoral Commission criticises the Government’s proposals for introducing piloting in a bottom-up fashion, explaining that the wrong sort of authorities will apply to take part. It also says that such pilot schemes will do nothing to counter fraud or increase participation, although everyone agrees that those things are necessary. It also adds that the schemes would add little value, considering the evidence already available from Northern Ireland, which is essentially a bigger pilot in a more problematic area than any local authority would be able to provide. It says that an important lesson from Northern Ireland relates to the importance of introducing individual registration, together with a very active package of measures to increase the number of people registering to vote. We will support not only our own amendments but the compromise suggested by the Electoral Commission, assuming that that option is provided to us. I want to talk about the system of individual voter registration more generally. Surely it is old fashioned to have household registration these days. The time of the idea of having a head of the household has passed. Many of the households that we are considering are shared homes in which a group of friends live together or in which some other relationship exists. The idea that we should return to the patriarchal system of the head of the household—[Interruption.] I know that the Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs does not like me to describe the system as ““patriarchal””. She prefers ““matriarchal””, and I must give her credit for that. Surely, however, the days in which this old-fashioned idea could exist are gone.