Electoral Administration Bill

That is another extremely good example, because the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), who has been running down the Welsh education system under both Governments, seems to imply that a large minority of his constituents are quite incapable of reading or filling in any form at all. They must therefore need all sorts of additional help to get any of the basic benefits that are available under this and previous Governments, or to comply with any of the tax and other rules that the Government have laid down. Presumably, the hon. Gentleman largely supports the Government and believes that they have found ways around that, so that people can get assistance if their literacy is stretched to fill in the tax credit or pension credit forms, their tax returns or whatever they need to do to gain benefits and to avoid paying the taxes that they do not need to pay. Yet he now says that they are incapable of getting the same assistance to do something that is much easier—providing a national insurance number. I am sure that if my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire asks me to vote for an amendment tabled by the Liberal Democrats in due course because it is slightly better than the Government’s proposal, I will loyally support him, but I am glad that we had the admission from the Liberal Democrats that their amendment does not amount to very much and will do very little to prevent the fraud that we now think is all too obvious in our electoral system, particularly surrounding postal votes. It would give me greater pleasure to support the proposal of my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire—the only serious proposal that we have before us today—as it goes some way to tightening up the system. I am sure that he would agree that it would not be perfect, but it would be a lot better than the current system or than the very modest Liberal Democrat proposal. The need to supply a national insurance number will make people think twice. They would have to commit another fraud if they wished to carry on with a fraudulent request before voting. There also would be an opportunity to check against the national insurance number records and to check that, if they were lying, they were doing so consistently—that they had lied at both opportunities, when they first registered to vote and when they registered for a postal vote. That would be made more difficult, and making it more difficult in this connection gives us a little more security. I hope that, if the proposal were to pass, the Government would understand that they also need to clean up their act not just on legal and illegal registration to vote, but on national insurance numbers. Many hundreds of thousands of such numbers have been issued over and above the number of legally settled workers that we believe are in the country, thus showing that the national insurance number system itself is far from perfect. To give even greater security, if the Government were to accept my hon. Friend’s proposition, we would need not just to introduce it as a security device for electoral registration, but to ask the Treasury to go through the national insurance lists to try to get the number of legally issued national insurance numbers into line with the number of legally settled and working people in our country. That would give us a further precaution against fraud.