Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, for raising this important issue. I will begin by responding to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. In his speech, there was a lot of ““could””, ““should”” and ““might be””. One of the critical issues that the noble Baroness rightly described in the amendment is that we should move away from ““could””, ““should”” and ““might be”” to being as clear as possible. I will deal with her questions as best I can and then talk about the specific details of the amendment. The noble Baroness is right that we have the responses to the consultation. I do not yet have a definitive statement from my honourable friend Bridget Prentice, who is the Minister responsible, on whether we should be looking for a gradual implementation or going for what one might describe as a ““big bang”” effect, but it is worth remembering that many registers are held electronically. Noble Lords accepted in Committee that what I was describing was not at all something that removed the power from the local level—that is the critical place where the register is held—but something that enabled the merging of these address books, if I may describe them like that, so that it would be found more valuable for the political parties, in particular, to access. There is no plan at this stage to go beyond that. The noble Baroness rightly raised both in Committee and in your Lordships’ House today the issue of making sure that if we were to move further than that—for example, people checking that their entry was correct online—we would have to tackle fraud absolutely. Indeed, she gave the figures for the concerns of the Financial Services Authority on fraud, which we take seriously. I completely accept that point. In Committee, we talked about the possibilities of CORE. I accept that we cannot move in any direction that would enable people to use it fraudulently. However, it is meant to be a tool that is useful to, for example, the political parties and the Electoral Commission. That is how we should think about it. When it comes to how to consider the national identity register, I understand very well from having followed the debates in your Lordships’ House and another place not just people’s sensitivities about this database, but—if I might say from my experience of other pieces of legislation in which I have been involved—the general concern that data are protected properly. I am the Minister with responsibility for data protection, so I, too, take that matter seriously. The noble Baroness is right to say that one should not be able to use the register differently without parliamentary scrutiny. For example, if one wanted—I stress ““if””—in the future to use the identity register to look at security checks to help to spot fraudulent or duplicate entries, one could do so only after we had followed the affirmative order procedure outlined in the Identity Cards Act as it currently stands. I have checked through all the possibilities that I could think of in relation to how we might link up the registers. None of them could be done without the affirmative regulation procedure. I would like to take a step further, if I might, but I crave the indulgence of your Lordships’ House, for I cannot do that without going back to my colleagues in the Home Office. My personal preference would be to accept the amendment, because I can see that the noble Baroness is seeking to make sure that, if we were to move in this direction, we would do so by using legislation appropriately. Noble Lords will know that there is further legislation that would need to come in. I cannot do that today because I would need to go back and confirm that point with colleagues. If the noble Baroness were willing to withdraw her amendment on the basis that we would have a discussion between now and Third Reading, my commitment would be that of course she should be allowed to bring it back if she felt it appropriate and if I had not resolved the issue. On that basis, I hope that the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.