I make it clear to the noble Lord, as I did previously, that I do not approach this proposal with cynicism, and I certainly did not suggest that I was in any way suspicious of either his motives or those of the noble Lord who moved the amendment. Indeed, it is courageous that representatives of Liberal Democrats want to put more students on the electoral register. That illustrates that they are not doing it entirely for their own benefit. What I am saying, however, is that you should not take a step down this road, which is to bring together data mining and data matching across government departments, unless you recognise the profundity of it.
Does the noble Lord accept that there will be increasing pressure, in times of austerity, for the government departments that he mentioned to move to the cloud, rather than retain their own databank and their own hardware? There will be great pressure—I see that the noble Lord agrees with me. Does he understand that many of the cloud servers have a business model that is dependent on mining the data that pass through their server in order to get to the databank? Therefore, you should not aggregate these data in such a way unless you recognise that the people in the private sector offering you the service of the cloud will mine those data. Maybe the noble Lord has already considered this but I am trying to make sure that we do not take such a step—not because I am cynical or doubt his motives but because real, profound questions arise out of it.