Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My noble friend, inevitably, gets there before me. I will come to that in a minute. Is it the Government’s intention to draw up the register based on these databases, which local authorities will be able to go into, and therefore add large numbers of people who have not registered to vote? If the Government are not going to do that, what is the point of going into the databases? There is no point at all. The Minister has implied that the Government are drawing up a register from the databases and then basically saying to people, ““You’re on the register. If you wish, you can prove to us that you do not live there any more and come off the register””. However, as my noble friend has quite rightly said, all this would have been solved—and considerable sums of money saved in the longer run—if we had introduced compulsory national identity cards and a national identity register. Each local authority could have used that and drawn up its own register without any bother whatever. That would not have been the only use. You could then use the card itself to vote electronically wherever you wished. That would have increased the number of people taking part in our democratic process, which would have been to the major benefit of our whole electoral system.