Electoral Administration Bill

I apologise to the House for the fact that I was unable to be here at the beginning of the debate; unfortunately I was caught in a meeting, but that in no way diminishes my belief in the importance of this debate and the issue that we are deciding on this afternoon. It is worth emphasising continually that everyone in the House accepts that, in principle and in a perfect world, it would be better to move to individual registration. I suspect that it would be better if we could have all sorts of other identifiers to ensure that everyone who voted in an election was the person who was meant to be voting. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world, so we must balance contending pressures. On the one hand, we must ensure that electoral fraud does not take place, but on the other hand, we must facilitate the registration of the maximum number of people so that they can take part in elections. That is the essence of our debate. May I say at the outset that I am concerned about fraud and the cases that have been heard in court? However, at every election, whether for local, regional or national Government—I am sure that all hon. Members have had the same experience—many people come to my headquarters to say, ““I’ve just discovered that I’m not on the register, and I can’t take part in the election.”” We have made it easier in the past few years for people to register almost up to election day, but if I counted up all the people in that position, they would vastly outnumber the total cases of fraud brought to court. I do not wish to minimise legitimate concerns about fraud, but we must look at the overall context, because we would be concerned if people could not exercise their democratic right to vote in elections.