Electoral Administration Bill

I beg to move, That this House disagrees with the Lords in the said amendment. The Government’s approach throughout the passage of this Bill has been to seek consensus wherever possible. Indeed, in several areas we have achieved it. For example, in response to issues raised in this House and in another place, we have made amendments to the co-ordinated online record of electors, to the new duties on electoral registration officers, to the position of service voters with the support of my colleagues at the Ministry of Defence, and to anonymous registration and other things. We have even achieved consensus on measures to address postal voting security. The Bill was introduced with provisions for the piloting of personal identifiers. Those clauses have been replaced by a national system of postal voting identifiers. Providing that the Bill receives Royal Assent soon, to which I will return later, these tough new security measures will be in place by the elections in 2007. The only remaining area on which we disagree is that of individual registration. We have set out our reasons for opposing individual registration, at this point, on a number of occasions, and I believe that right hon. and hon. Members are by now fully aware of them. Today, therefore, I shall focus instead on addressing Members’ concerns about the measures we are taking outside individual registration. In previous debates, the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) who speaks for the official Opposition on this matter, has expressed his view that individual registration will address two issues: the security of electoral registers and potential fraud in polling stations. On the first point, we should not ignore the significant changes that the Bill already puts in place to make electoral registers more secure. Under the Bill, electoral registration officers will be able to remove ineligible people from the register right up to five days before polling day and, for the first time, people will be able to make public objections to entries on the register that they believe to be inaccurate or fraudulent. An ERO will consider every objection, and can call for evidence and remove people who prove to be wrongly registered. That opportunity, too, will be available up to five days before the close of poll.