Electoral Administration Bill

I will certainly try to do that. We were primarily looking to address concerns—raised by the political parties, among others—about the need to access 400-plus different schemes in order to get the information that they needed, and the desire to have one overarching record. Critically, the register remains locally based; people will register locally, as they have done before. We are simply describing a way to pull all that information together. The ambition—it is an ambition because we have to test and ensure that we can do this—will ultimately be to have the opportunity to help with, perhaps, anti-fraud measures by seeing where people are registered twice; to enable political parties to access required information more readily—not, as we will discuss in future amendments, individual EROs, but political parties, nationally; and to have this record of the register at a national level. It is no more than that. Although it is a critical part of the Bill, it is, in a sense, not meant to detract from the value and importance of the local register; rather, it is an opportunity to keep the register up to speed and up to date in a national framework with a national record. There are, perhaps, opportunities for us to look at how people might be able to get hold of and amend their own records, if that is appropriate—security and safeguards will be critical for that. There may also be opportunities to use the scheme as political parties want to and to see it as an extra tool and asset for understanding our electorate better. But it is no more than that; it is not meant to be used for other purposes.