Electoral Administration Bill

The hon. Gentleman may be wide eyed but I doubt that he is bushy tailed or innocent. Let me deal briefly with the other amendments in the group. I look forward with interest to Conservative Members’ comments on new clause 5 about prisoners, and with even more interest to the Minister’s reply. The European Court of Human Rights has made a judgment on the issue and there is a legitimate and sensible argument for prisoners’ rights to vote. There is no obvious correlation between the deprivation of liberty and that of other civil rights that prisoners hold. We maintain several citizens’ rights in the case of prisoners. We currently deprive them of their right to participate in the democratic process, but in many countries that does not apply. In recent years, I have been an election monitor in countries in the developing democracies of central and eastern Europe. I have visited some pretty filthy prisons there. I remember one in Tblisi where prisoners had the right to vote and were voting. It was happening under extraordinary conditions, but nevertheless they had the opportunity to exercise their franchise. Let us not assume that, simply because it is not the practice in this country to give prisoners the right to vote, it is necessarily wrong to do so. It is sometimes argued that it is a good thing to do in preparing for release. I look forward to the Minister’s reply because that will tell us what the Government intend to do about the adverse finding, which they need to address at some stage in future, if not now. I have no argument with the Government’s application of the safety test to others. It derives from discussion in Committee and I am grateful to them for tackling the matter. New clause 2 constitutes a desperately important declaratory statement, which would mean that no one had any doubt about the principal duties of registration officers and the importance that we, as a Parliament, attach to their duties in franchising the citizens of this country. Woe betide any local authority that does not provide the encouragement or the resources to enable them to do that job even more effectively than they do it now.