Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, it was not my intention to speak. Members opposite will know I have not spoken that often during these long debates. However, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, rather than trying to calm things down, actually provokes people into speaking and that is the case in this instance. I just say to my noble friend Lord Myners that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, may travel in a big limousine, but I travelled on a No. 3 bus with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, this morning. He does not travel in a big limo. At the start of this debate, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours made a point about the position and number of polling stations, not just in rural areas—which my noble friend Lord Myners raised—but also in urban areas. I remember particularly at one point during my career as a Member of Parliament in Glasgow Cathcart, the local government boundaries were redrawn. One of them went down the middle of Mount Florida, so one side of the road was one local government seat, and on the other side was the other. On one side of the road in that new local government seat, there were two multi-storey blocks of flats. On the other side was the polling station for the road, in the school where those people had gone to vote for all the time that they had been in those flats. Now they were being told to go and vote half a mile or a mile away. Many of the people who lived in those flats were elderly. I accept that I am of the age where the bulk of my major campaigning, certainly as a Member of Parliament, was done before that big introduction of postal voting for the elderly. In my day, in order to get a postal vote you had to have a tame doctor who would go along and sign a form. I accept that I am therefore of the elderly. Indeed, I will get a free TV licence on 5 May, the date of the elections and of the referendum, when I will reach the great age of 75. However, the fact is that, while people can now of course use postal voting, many elderly people want to use their vote personally. They want to go out and, if they are fit and able, go to the polling station and cast their vote. My noble friend is quite right to say that the turnout is affected in some cases by where the polling station is situated. I finish by making the point, yet again, that we would not need polling stations at all as such, and that people would be able to vote anywhere, if we had electronic voting by using ID cards. Indeed, although the Government got rid of ID cards because they said that those were so expensive, if we look at the uses that could be made of an ID card we would actually save money in the long run by having them for everybody.