My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 39. As my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth put it a few minutes ago, with admirable and characteristic brevity—in contrast to one or two other noble Lords—this is very much linked to the amendment that my noble friend the Minister has said he is prepared to take away and think about again. If we are going to have, in some constituencies, just two or three signing places and only two weeks for the signing, then the pressure on those places will be considerable. To succeed in a recall petition in an average-sized constituency, 7,500 people will have to descend upon those one or two places. So there is a direct relationship. If my noble friend the Minister is able to say that in geographically larger constituencies, where it is more difficult to obtain satisfactory locations in so few places, there will be an increase, perhaps to eight or nine places—or whatever it may be in the islands; I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes—or, for example, in my old constituency in Cornwall, to six or seven places, then reducing the number of weeks to two weeks is much easier. Otherwise there will be enormous pressure.
I hope that my noble friend will accept, having generously and sensibly said that he is prepared to go away and think about the issue of the maximum and the minimum numbers of signing venues, that this also applies to the number of weeks that they are active. The numbers otherwise could be extremely difficult to manage.