I am grateful to my hon. Friend, but you will forgive me, Sir Roger, if I do not speculate about the popularity or otherwise of my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) in the various Orange lodges of his constituency—going down that path would not end well for any of us in the Chamber. However, my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) is absolutely right that careful consideration has to be given. Again, we have not had enough detail. We are working from a series of assumptions about petition stations being in council offices and polling stations, but Ministers have not set out in any detail where they are likely to be.
Finally, in relation to my earlier point about consultation, there is a requirement for returning officers to consult at least with political parties and other interested parties on the siting of polling stations, and indeed on the boundaries of polling stations within electoral wards. We have not yet seen anything that would explicitly require the petition officer at least to consult. There is more work to be done on that issue.
We also have concerns about proxy and postal votes. The Minister might like to say a little more about why existing postal voters will still have to write in to request a postal vote, rather than simply being issued a petition form by post. I press the Minister to give us some satisfaction in that regard. Will he also confirm that there is often a last-minute flurry of activity to join the electoral register? I appreciate that he has made it clear that one has to be on the register at the trigger date, but often there can be a slight administrative delay, as we saw in the recent referendum in Scotland. Can he confirm that the application, rather than its processing, will be taken as the cut-off point as there can sometimes be a few days’ backlog?