I apologise to the House for having been absent for some 90 minutes. I am grateful to you for calling me, Mr Speaker.
I entirely support the direction and aims of the Bill, but as the Minister will know from some of our earlier conversations, I want to press him on one or two matters and ask him for his thoughts. I should like him perhaps to go a little bit further.
Let us start from the premise that in many boroughs and districts throughout the country it is harder to obtain a library card than to exercise one’s franchise, which is a state of affairs that has left us open to the possibility of fraudulent use of that franchise by people who are on the electoral register when they are not entitled to be. Indeed, people are sometimes encouraged to act in that way. A council employee may simply knock on people’s doors between certain months of the year and take their details without requiring them to prove their qualification or identification.