Electoral Administration Bill

I want to add a little bit. What is this going to cost? It is going to cost £12 million to set up. What are the rest of the costs for an authority or person to oversee this? What are they going to oversee? Does this require a galaxy of people checking that all the information is coming in from the EROs? Does it require a lot of technicians to keep it going? The business plan, which must have been put together for this, presumably determined what sort of numbers of people are going to be involved, both at a pilot level and for the whole national scheme. There is a great danger that money will be top-sliced off local government finance to pay ongoing costs, as well as capital costs. How then is that money going to be bid for? Is it going to be bid for? Is the CORE keeper going to have to put in an annual estimate of his costs? We need to tease out now what this scheme is, how big and grandiose it is, whether it will need to be built on and who on earth is going to be funding it. If it is not the ODPM directly, is it going to come out of over-burdened local government finance? This is the area we need to dig into.