I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for his comments and I recognise his very considerable expertise in this area. I used to think that I understood something about electoral law but I learnt that there is a great deal more than I do not entirely understand.
My understanding is that we are talking about more than 100,000 postal voters being written to—some 114,000 is the figure that I have in mind—and the cost of this, which is thought to be somewhere above £100,000, will be reimbursed. I do not have to hand the exact figures for which areas will be most affected.
There are all sorts of reasons why people do not complete their postal ballots correctly. I am told that one of the commonest problems is that husbands and wives, completing their forms over the breakfast table, often put them in the wrong envelopes and thus the forms have the wrong signifiers on them. However, there is a range of other reasons, including that if people are ill—if they have had a stroke, for example—their signatures change radically.