Electoral Administration Bill

As I said when we were discussing Amendment No. 5, we agree with the spirit of what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is seeking to do by tabling these amendments. CORE will not change the information that is collected or the people or organisations to whom it may be provided. However, some of the regulations that are appropriate at local level do not work in a national context. I have already given the noble Lord the example of the register being available for public inspection. However, I shall go through the noble Lord’s amendments in a little more detail and see whether I can reassure him. If our only purpose in controlling the information in CORE was to extend the controls that apply to EROs and recipients of electoral register data in existing legislation, we could simply amend it to cover a CORE keeper’s use of the data. The automatic extension to CORE keepers of regulations that govern the supply of lists, records, copies of the registers, prohibitions, and so on, is already provided for in Clause 2(2). The benefit of the Secretary of State being able to set out explicitly in the CORE scheme how those provisions apply to CORE keepers is clarity. In particular, it is important in relation to the provisions in regulations that include criminal offences. For example, the regulations to which Clause 2(2) refers always refer to registers. The essential difference between the CORE keeper and the ERO is that the former mainly keeps information and records whereas the latter keeps registers. Therefore, the regulations to which Clause 2(2) refers are all expressed by references to registers. The most obvious example of a relevant modification under Clause 2(3)(b) would be a provision in the scheme that states that the regulations apply as if the word ““register”” also includes references to a ““record””. That is an example that indicates why we think it is important not to lose the power to make modifications because of the nature of the differences between the two. I do not accept Amendment No. 18 because the circumstances of a CORE keeper are likely to warrant some variation from the current rules that apply to EROs. We have the affirmative resolution procedure and consultation built in to the Bill, as I described earlier. I have already indicated the most obvious example, which is the register being available for inspection at the offices of the ERO. We think that is reasonable in view of the size of the areas covered by individual EROs. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, referred to freedom of information and the need to ensure that we have information available, but that becomes unreasonable when applied to the CORE keeper who is eventually expected to cover the whole of the UK. The way in which we might determine that would be different under regulations that apply to the CORE keeper. We want to retain the ability to apply the majority of existing regulations but also have the ability to vary or exclude some where they are clearly inappropriate. Amendment No. 19 is an alternative to Amendment No. 18, as the noble Lord said. It is intended to operate alongside Amendment No. 17 which removes the ““may”” element. I hope that he will not pursue that because, while I can see how it fits in with how he has put this group of amendments together, we have tried to design a scheme that will have the appropriate level of scrutiny, but which recognises the differences between a local scheme and what one would seek to do in a national record of the register.