Commons Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment No. 33, which is grouped with this amendment and also refers to electronic registers. My amendment asks that,"““Regulations under subsection (1) which require the keeping of electronic registers will be funded centrally””." At government level, the computerisation of records is clearly very difficult and in many cases is disastrous. The computerisation of systems appears to be fraught with cost overruns, major errors and customer distress. I am not qualified to even hazard a guess about why that should be so, but it has been happening with sufficient regularity for me to be concerned enough to ask the Government to be required to pay the council tax payer for this service, as the commons registration officers are based in local authorities. A commons registration authority may decide that putting its system on the computer would be cost-effective or that some other reason, such as chronic staff shortage, dictates such a move. In that case, I should have no difficulty with the idea that it should foot the bill. However, if the Government issued instructions and then went on, as this clause allows, to specify the nuts and bolts of the methods that the authority should use, the Government should at least pay for the conversion costs. It is in the light of past experience of the cost of computerisation of records that I have tabled the amendment.