Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am very glad to hear that. I think that at last we have achieved consensus on an issue where there was no apparent consensus on Second Reading or, for a good deal of the time, in Committee. There are, though, serious problems to consider, and the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) rightly raised a large number, which I will not repeat because time is short. If I could be forgiven for making a parochial point from my own constituency, a typical question that arises when one moves to a system of individual registration is what happens to students. At the moment, students in halls of residence are often treated by the electoral registration officer as living in a single household, and the university or college authorities take the role of head of household and fill in the electoral registration forms on behalf of those students. If we are to move to a system of individual registration, as we should, it will take a while for those institutions to work out new ways of encouraging their students to register. That is possible, and it is not something to be afraid of, but it needs time to work through to ensure that it happens. Like other Members, I am concerned about the process by which this change of direction has been announced. The Minister says that he has been listening in the course of the debates on Second Reading and in Committee. That is true. I would like to pay tribute to the way in which he has approached the Bill; he has indeed listened. However, if someone is listening, they should take sufficient time to work out what they are going to do as a consequence of what they have heard. He might have felt somewhat rushed by the fact that we have had one day on Report, with a second day now under way, and felt that he had to announce these proposals before they had been properly written down. It would have been better, in process terms, and would have shortened the debate—certainly, shortened his speech—if we had taken a few more days before getting to the second day on Report. We would then have had before us proposals that were fully written out and that we could consider and debate in the normal way. As it is, we will end up taking even more time and there will be even more worries about the content of what is proposed. However, as I said to the hon. Member for Epping Forest earlier, those proposals are not before us tonight: not in this group of new clauses and amendments, nor in any group. Instead, we have before us new clauses about data sharing. Because of the debates that have been going on in the Committee on the Coroners and Justice Bill, many of us are rather more sensitive to the problems raised—