Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, the Bill does much to improve the quality of electoral administration in this country and will therefore make a significant contribution to improving the health of our democracy. It makes significant improvements to electoral legislation as we left it in 2000. We have clearly all learnt lessons since then about the issues that we failed to address—in particular, those relating to loans to parties and the potential for postal vote fraud in the 2000 legislation. But there is still very much more to do on some of these issues, and I think that the evidence just given by the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, is something to which we shall return in due course. We have made progress on these issues—in particular, with the assistance of the noble Lord, Lord Elder, on tightening up the potential for postal vote fraud. We have ensured that a person who returns a postal vote is the same as the person who applied for it, and that is very welcome. But we have not yet ensured that the person who applies for and returns a postal vote is the same as the person listed on the electoral register, and I think that we shall return to that issue at some point in the future.