My Lords, I shall dial down the rhetoric a little here. First, I want to pick up what the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said with great conviction —that it was beyond the wildest imagination that this could be a deliberate attempt at voter suppression. The Minister made the same point in responding to an earlier group. The Committee owes it to both of them to take that in good faith. So I shall move on and say that I also take in good faith what the Minister has said at least twice during our proceedings, which is that he rejects the concept of the precautionary principle. I shall make an assumption, based on a fair amount of evidence—although that is not collected from these debates in particular—that he is also against the gold-plating of legislation.
I shall speak particularly to Amendment 80, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts. All the other amendments in the group have great merit and require careful consideration by the Minister, but Amendment 80 is what has attracted my attention for further comment. Incidentally, I was originally going to say that I did not believe it encompassed parliamentary passes—but I notice that item (q) in the list is “a workplace ID card”, so possibly we may qualify under that. It would be ironic, would it not, if a busy Member of Parliament seeking re-election, dashing to the polling station at 9.55 pm on realising that they had failed to vote, was turned away because their parliamentary pass was not sufficient identity to get into the building? I see that I am going to be intervened on by another noble Lord, who, like me, has a pass that does not qualify him to vote—but that is a separate issue.