Individual Voter Registration

Let me come to that point in a moment, because I want to spend a little time on it, if I may. If my hon. Friend does not think that I have addressed it, I shall be happy to take another intervention from him. Let me run through one or two parts of the motion that are defective, and which lead me to urge my hon. Friends to oppose it. I hope that I shall do so with the same tone with which the right hon. Member for Tooting introduced it. It is true that we supported the proposals for individual registration in the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, but it is worth reminding the House that the previous Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to include them. They were not in the Bill when it was introduced in the House of Commons, which is why we voted for a reasoned amendment. In fact, they were not in the Bill at all when it left the House of Commons, although by that stage the Labour Government had made a commitment to include them, and they were introduced in the Bill in the other place. My right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr Maude), who was leading for us on the issue at the time, said:"““I am glad that at the eleventh hour the Government have, at last, agreed to move ahead with individual voter registration, albeit in what still seems to be a lamentably leisurely time scale. They committed to the principle of individual voter registration many years ago, but a bit like St. Augustine, they seem to be saying, 'Make me chaste, but not yet.'””—[Official Report, 2 March 2009; Vol. 488, c. 695.]" My right hon. Friend made it clear that we approved of the decision to proceed with individual registration, which we thought could be accomplished earlier. We said that it would be our intention to do so, but that is not what the right hon. Gentleman said. On page 47 of our 2010 manifesto we made a commitment to"““swiftly implement individual voter registration””." It is not fair—or, at least, it leaves out something quite important—to say that there was complete cross-party consensus on that measure.