Electoral Administration Bill

I know what is going on. I shall respond to Amendments Nos. 12, 13 and 24. When I saw what the noble Lord proposed under Amendment No. 12, I had enormous sympathy, because I, too, find it difficult to navigate my way through the person/body debate. My natural instinct was to say that the noble Lord has a point and that we should do this—but of course I was put right, and I shall attempt to read into the record how the process works, which I hope will give the noble Lord the assurances that he seeks about what the wording means. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Norton, will have a look at this as well, as it is absolutely up his street. We think—and we made this clear throughout the consultation—that the obvious choice to be CORE keeper when we have a national scheme is the Electoral Commission. That is not a certainty but, as I said earlier, we need within the legislation to allow for it to be done, because we need primary legislation to achieve it. We have done this in a way that says, ““We think that that is what we are going to do, but we are not certain, and we are consulting on that as well””. But if we take a staged approach, as we have indicated that we want to do, we will be some considerable way from that final outcome. It might be, for example, that initially a local electoral registration officer would be the CORE keeper, because that might be appropriate when we are testing the scheme and rolling it out. The Bill provides for both eventualities, which is why the provision is laid out as it is. After the Interpretation Act 1978, with which noble Lords are of course familiar, the term ““person”” in Clause 1(1) of the Bill includes both a body corporate, such as the Electoral Commission, and a designated statutory role, such as an ERO. Under the provision, either an ERO or the commission could therefore be appointed as CORE keeper. I see that the noble Lord is nodding, which I hope is because he knows what the Interpretation Act 1978 is all about, as I would expect. The Bill also provides that the CORE keeper must be a public authority. An ERO is a public authority in his own right. He has a degree of independence from the local authority by which he is employed when he is carrying out the statutory functions relating to the registration of electors, which—as the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, knows well—are imposed on him by the Representation of the People Acts. The Electoral Commission is also a public authority, so again the Bill as drafted provides for either an ERO or the commission to be the CORE keeper. Amendment No. 12 would require that the CORE keeper be a person in a designated office within a ““public authority””, which would preclude the commission, or any other body corporate, from being designated CORE keeper. Instead, we would have to have the chief executive officer or the chairman of the commission designated as CORE keeper. That may look fine on the face of it, but it would be inconsistent with the law relating to incorporated bodies, because within that law we do not specify which particular member or office holder has conferred upon him or her legal responsibilities and functions. It might also create difficulties in being unduly restrictive. When the noble Lord looked at the question, as I certainly did, without looking at the legal position, it looked like a strange anomaly within the legislation. In fact, it enables us to use either alternative, for reasons that I have given. I hope when he reflects on that, he will appreciate that although I have given a rather ““techie””, or technical, response, it addresses the point. The question raised by Amendment No. 13 is important, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, because the provision enables political parties to operate and gives the potential in future to look at fraudulent double-counting, which is a valuable anti-fraud device. But the noble Lord suggested that underneath the question was the issue of the ID cards register. That is not part of the Government’s current planning within this Bill; this is about creating a record from the registers, for the reasons that I have given. I hope that that reassures the noble Lord. On Amendment No. 24, the drafting changes are interesting, and I shall take the matter away to discuss it with parliamentary counsel. I shall write to the noble Lord to indicate my response.