Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 22:"Page 3, line 28, leave out ““If a CORE scheme makes”” and insert ““A CORE scheme must make””" The noble Lord said: In moving Amendment No. 22, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 23 and 25. Amendment No. 22 refers to Clause 2(8), which states:"““If a CORE scheme makes provision which allows an elector to have access to information relating to him which is kept by the CORE keeper, the scheme must also make provision to enable the elector to request any changes to the information””." The purpose of tabling this amendment and Amendment No. 23, which is part and parcel of it, is to make the subsection provide that there must be provision within a CORE scheme to allow electors to access the information that the CORE register has on them. I am not clear in what circumstances a CORE scheme would deny people the right to check the information held on them, not least because that seems the most obvious way to check if there is a discrepancy between the local register and the national record of electors. This is a probing amendment to discover in what circumstances the Government think that such a right ought to be denied. It is the sort of right that people have under the Data Protection Act. I am not quite clear how that Act and the CORE scheme would interact. Perhaps the Minister will tell us. Amendment No. 25 relates to the circumstances in which an electoral registration officer can have access to information provided to the CORE keeper by a different electoral registration officer. It sets out circumstances in which that would be possible, such as people’s right to be registered and their right to change their registration. For example, if they are in north Cornwall and want to move to Pendle, they can do so through the national system. The amendment also refers to access to information that we discussed under the previous group of amendments with regard to wrongdoers fiddling the electoral system, voting twice, or whatever. I am attracted by the idea that this sets out clearly the specific circumstances in which this can take place and no other. It is an interesting point and the purpose of moving the amendment is to probe why the Government are doing this. Do they think there are no other circumstances in which such sharing of information between electoral registration officers in two different local authorities would be appropriate? It seems an obvious thing to do if we have this fancy new national database. We may in due course learn to love it. Some of us will always be suspicious of it, but we are going to get it and we must make the best of it. I beg to move.