Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I am not making any presumption about the date it will start because it would depend on Royal Assent, and therefore I am not going to speculate on when that might be. I know that the noble and learned Lord has a later amendment regarding resources, tabled for the avoidance of doubt. When we come to it, he will see that it is not necessary because as the Bill stands, the resources ought to be there to be drawn on for the purposes of this review. If he thinks about it, given all the comments made by noble Lords opposite about the Government wishing to get this piece of legislation through, they are hardly likely to wish then to frustrate it through lack of resources. That is perhaps self-evident. We will have a better opportunity to discuss the level of resources when we come to that particular amendment, but I would assure him that we do not anticipate that the issue of resources will be a barrier to the timetable being delivered. Perhaps we may move on to the other barrel of the amendment, which would have the effect of delaying the boundary reviews until such time as, "““the Electoral Commission has certified that every local authority has taken all reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible””." That is quite a steep requirement. My noble friend Lord Tyler questioned whether it would be appropriate for the Electoral Commission to make subjective judgments in cases that could have major consequences for a boundary review, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, raised some of the practical difficulties that again were picked up in an exchange with my noble friend Lord Tyler. I would simply observe that if the Electoral Commission decided that, in its judgment, one local authority in the whole of the United Kingdom had not done this, a boundary review could be put off indefinitely. It certainly would not be in time for the 2015 election, it might not be in time for the 2020 election, and it might not even be in time for the 2025 election. That is the possible logical consequence of the amendment put forward by the noble and learned Lord. If there was a problem with a boundary review where the baseline for the review would be 1 December 2010, if we held elections in 2020 or 2025 where the boundaries for England were based on a baseline of data from the year 2000, that really does not address the very legitimate issues he has raised with regard to people who might be eligible to vote but might not be on the electoral roll.