Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2008

My Lords, I too welcome the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, to the Northern Ireland government team. I support these two orders. I was going to raise the question about up-to-date photographs, but I hesitate to do so after the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran. If he spent 13 years in the Armed Forces, I am pretty certain he blacked up for night manoeuvres and impersonated a tree. He would have made a very good tree. I do not believe that changing one’s personality is confined to the female gender. We are pleased to see these changes in the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations to make it as convenient as possible for people in Northern Ireland to exercise their right to vote without undermining the security of the electoral processes there. We very much welcome the introduction of two additional forms of photographic ID to be used as identifiers for voting: the blind person’s smart pass and the war-disabled smart pass. We hope that this will go some way to ensure that as many people are not turned away from polling stations for not having the right form of identification as we saw in the Assembly elections in March 2007. We also support the provision that will allow the chief electoral officer to gather information from secondary schools in Northern Ireland, to help in encouraging young people to vote. As previous Ministers will be aware, it is the Liberal Democrats’ policy to extend the right to vote to 16 year-olds. We hope this initiative will be useful in encouraging younger voters to participate in elections and the political process. It is also extremely useful to have previous regulations consolidated in this way, along with the new changes. We hope that this will be helpful to the chief electoral officer and to others involved in elections in Northern Ireland. Finally, with regard to the second order, we are pleased that armed service personnel in Northern Ireland are now being brought into line with the rest of the UK. My noble friend the late Lord Garden pressed very heavily for this, and it is good to see his influence in its extension to Northern Ireland. We support the orders.