Electoral Administration Bill

I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Lady for her interpretation of the Electoral Commission’s intention, but let me read out what it intends in its own words, rather than hers, because this is an important issue:"““The intention of this new clause and amendments is to remove clauses for the piloting of the collection of personal identifiers and instead provide a requirement for all absent voters at local and UK parliamentary elections to include in their applications for an absent vote details of their date of birth and a signature, which must have been previously registered in respect of that person. Only those who have provided these personal identifiers are to be included on absent voter lists.””" That is, I think, exactly what I said. The right hon. and learned Lady may well query the efficacy of my amendments in putting that proposal into effect, and she may well be right to do so—I do not know. I have done my best in dealing with an extraordinarily complex area of electoral law. But she surely cannot query the commission’s intention, or mine, in tabling these amendments, which are quite clear. They provide the lock that we all want to see. I do not believe that the pilot scheme will do what the right hon. and learned Lady says it will do. For a start, I doubt whether it will be completed to the time scale that she envisages. I do not believe that, under her proposals, we will go into the next general election with a more secure voting system than the current one. Nor do I believe that it will provide a proper test, given that the pilot schemes are to be based in volunteer local authorities that will opt into the scheme. The authorities that give rise to the most concern about the lack of registration are exactly those that will not volunteer. They will not enter into a scheme introducing personal identifiers of any kind, for precisely the reasons that she has already stated, so we will not have a proper reflection of the efficacy, or otherwise, of the scheme. My worry is that a few already well-performing local authorities—probably those in the shire counties and the leafier suburbs—will enter into this arrangement and provide us with information that, frankly, is of very little value. We will not get such information from inner-city London, Manchester, Birmingham or Bradford; we will not get it from those places where it is recognised that such abuses happen, in the light of prosecutions that have already been made. Our great worry is that we will miss the opportunity to get a better system in place.