Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, I had not intended to speak, as I thought after the very substantial debate that we had on these matters in Committee that we had formed a sort of consensus view on how to proceed. However, it seems that we have an amendment today that would establish, as I understood it on my preliminary reading, a national roll-out of individual registration in all conditions. I will use my words with very great care in the light of the amendments that I moved in Committee, but I will say this. There is a tradition in this country of liberty and tolerance. In recent years, practices that many of us find alien have been brought into our electoral arrangements. Those practices appear to take place in very few parts of the country. I am at a loss to understand why we should punish the whole nation for the sins of a few, when the sins of the few take place only in a very small number of areas of the United Kingdom. My amendments in Committee very sensitively dealt with that issue, by suggesting that local authorities—where they believed that a particular problem existed—should have the right to apply for the introduction of a scheme whereby individual identifiers on the basis that the noble Baroness has presented would be required. There was a feeling among Members of the Committee that the issue was sensitive and that we should not go down that particular route; but I still believe that we should go down that route. I do not believe that it is right that we should require a system that is onerous to be applied nationally to every citizen that votes in the United Kingdom because of what has happened in certain parts of the United Kingdom, in very small areas, when we could deal with those problems in isolation on the basis of the amendments that I proposed. It is wrong that we should go down that route. I shall say no more on this occasion other than that I hope, in the event that the amendment is carried today, that there are people at the other end who understand the concerns that I am expressing, who subscribe to the same view that we should preserve the arrangements based on tolerance that have existed over the past 150 years, and we should maintain that kind of arrangement and not simply punish everyone for the sins of a few.