Electoral Administration Bill

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, that I love the idea that I gave a ruling. That would be a first in my experience. As the noble Lord knows, these things are agreed and the Minister is told where his or her Bill will be. I sympathise enormously with the noble Lord wanting to be in two places at one time. Occasionally Ministers are expected to be in two places at once; it has certainly happened to me. I have been billed to be in both the Chamber and this room at the same time, so I have a huge appreciation of the difficulties. I recognise the difficulty and, although we will be distraught should the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, decide not to spend the rest of the day with us, I am always available to talk in greater detail about issues relating to this legislation. One day the noble Lord might even find that we are in the Chamber debating a Bill while something very interesting takes place in this room, so we will always have a bit of a dilemma in that regard. But I hope that the noble Lord will take the point that I shall be delighted to talk to him at any time about this legislation. I hope that noble Lords will accept that I am not trying to suggest that the matter under discussion here is straightforward and simple in the sense that it is just a piece of computer technology to bring the register into a record. But I also do not want the innovative approach of CORE to be seen as something that it is not. Therefore, in the consultation paper and the legislation we have tried to be as clear as possible about what we are seeking to achieve, and of course noble Lords will reflect on that. But we should not elevate it beyond what it is, which is where I think the noble lord, Lord Greaves, begins his approach to all the amendments in this group. We need to be clear about what CORE is and is not, and this afternoon I shall try to address those points as effectively as I can. We set out in the consultation document what we are seeking to achieve. In relation to Amendment No. 14, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, asked what else we might want to do and about the purpose of subsection (11)(d). It is often the case in legislation that among the specific points is one that is more general. We are seeking to address the questions of the accuracy and integrity of all the registers and to ease the administrative burden—political parties refer to this—of large-scale users of electoral registration data. There are many software packages which are not successful or easy to use. We might be able to compare data from different EROs under the provision of online access, if that were appropriate to CORE. If we moved to the point where the noble Lord could check his information on CORE and discover an inaccuracy which he wished to correct, and if we could develop what I call the online banking type of scheme, new information would be generated. The noble Lord would need some kind of security code, and the Bill needs to cater for that. Bringing together the registers will result in a useful record in particular circumstances and we need the capacity to deal with these points. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, got to the essence of the issue, which is about removing elections from local control. The argument is about the importance of the local register versus the national, overarching record. The Bill does not allow for the removal of elections from local control; we would need primary legislation to go that far. I am quite interested in the ways in which people can express their vote. I have said many times that my children have a completely different view of technology and accessing information. Such changes may in future affect how people exercise their democratic right, but we are nowhere near that happening. The Bill is not about that but about setting up an overarching record of the registers. That brings me to Amendment No. 15.