Electoral Administration Bill

The hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) sat down rather abruptly and caught me by surprise. I welcome the attitude of the Minister and her colleagues in the Department towards our consideration of the Bill. We have made progress in all sorts of ways, sometimes in surprising areas, given the initial response that we received in Committee. Common sense obviously prevailed at a later stage, for which I am grateful. I must say that it contrasts markedly with the attitude displayed by a previous incarnation when we discussed the Bill that became the European Parliamentary Elections Act 1999. At that time, no attempt was made to reach a consensus; indeed, a very partisan view was taken. The amendments, and this part of the Bill, highlight a key aspect of parliamentary drafting. As I tried to translate the Electoral Commission’s proposal into amendments I was struck by the extraordinary complexity of our statutory electoral arrangements, although in this context clarity is essential. I do not know how on earth any electoral returning officer can find his or her way through the thickets of the statutes that they must implement, let alone someone lacking expert advice. I think that in future we should consider electoral arrangements as candidates for consolidation. When we amend them by statute we should start with a clean sheet, almost ab initio, and absorb the earlier statute into a new Bill dealing with all the rules, rather than expecting returning officers to consult the Representation of the People Acts 1983, 1985 and 2000, and all the other relevant Acts. They cross-reference in a bewildering way, and even skilled draftsmen and lawyers find it difficult to manoeuvre their way around them. Throughout the debate there has been a degree of good will between Front Benchers, and indeed between Back Benchers who spoke in Committee and on the Floor of the House. However, we have been presented with a false dichotomy of approach, as though one side was saying ““Never mind the quality, feel the width”” and the other side was saying ““Never mind the width, feel the quality””—as if some can think only in terms of increasing the number of people who are properly registered, and others can think only in terms of potential abuse of the system and the need to deal with fraud. I do not believe that those are alternatives. I believe that we can have both a properly representative register, and one that prevents fraud wherever possible.