Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

No, I will not. I had enough of the hon. Lady's nonsense in a previous intervention, which I will come to in a minute. In the Electoral Administration Act 2006, we tried to put pressure on electoral registration officers to ensure that they did their job properly, and progress has been made. Best practice is out there, but it takes time. I have managed to improve the situation in my constituency. Working closely with the electoral registration officer, we have put an extra 6,000 people on to the electoral register, 1,000 of whom were in a ward with houses in multiple occupation. I pay tribute to the work of Gareth Evans, the electoral registration officer in my constituency who has brought that about. Individual registration is opposed by many Labour Members because we know that when it is introduced the electoral register goes down by 10%, as it has in Northern Ireland, and that the people who come off the register are the poorest in society. We were prepared to accept that because the previous Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), said that individual registration would go hand in hand with increasing the register. I predict that the Government parties will blow a hole in the consensus and go for rushed individual registration, taking another 4.5 million people off the register in addition to the 3.5 million who are already off it. That bipartisanship will be lost for a long time unless they get those 3.5 million people back on to the register. The Deputy Prime Minister can talk in high-falutin' language about the Reform Act of 1832, but if they are going to take 8 million of the poorest people off the register, and keep them off, they know that they are doing wrong. The British people deserve better than this.