Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, I am pleased to support the noble Lord, Lord Rix, by adding my name to this group of amendments. With his speech at Second Reading, and in moving the lead Amendment No. 118, the noble Lord has, as always, clearly explained the meaning and the intention of these amendments. There is no need for me to go into any further detail. We can all agree that words such as ““lunatic”” and ““idiot”” have no place in legislation. Yet these amendments can deal only with the common law concept of incapacity, as it applies to electoral law. The Minister will remember the many debates we had involving capacity and incapacity on the Mental Capacity Act. As I said, these amendments deal with the common law concept of incapacity as it applies to electoral law. Unfortunately these amendments are not able to deal with offensive wording which appears in statute on the face of Acts of Parliament. For example, I am not sure whether noble Lords are aware but Section 118 of the Taxes Management Act 1970 under ““Interpretation”” has the following definition:"““‘incapacitated person’ means any infant, person of unsound mind, lunatic, idiot or insane person””." That might be called the casual offensiveness of the draftsman’s lexicon of that time. I have not been able to find those words in other Acts of Parliament, but I have tried very hard to see if the scope of this Bill would enable an amendment to be tabled to amend the Taxes Management Act. So far I have not been successful, but I should warn my noble friend that there is still Third Reading—as I have raised the subject on Report, an amendment would be admissible at Third Reading. A final serious point—the amendment to this Bill and the offensiveness of the words in the 1970 Act, which I have just quoted, show just how far we have come since 1970. Those of us, and there are many outside this place and in the other place, who have campaigned for years for the rights of disabled people to be seen as a full part of civil rights and human rights can get some satisfaction that the words so casually used in common law and in statute are now inconceivable. I congratulate and thank the Government on helping to draft the amendments and the noble Lord, Lord Rix, for moving them so ably. As I understand it, the Government intend to accept these amendments—they had better because they drafted them. This will be three successive amendments accepted by the Government, which shows that we are a listening Government.