Electoral Administration Bill

The noble Lord is right to raise this. Yes, it has gone into the baseline, so it is continual funding. We have also funded about £1 million to third-party software vendors and individual registration officers to ensure that their systems can output data in the agreed standardised form, which has been a big issue in some areas. We have costed what is in the Bill in terms of the impact on local government and have transferred it across, which we would be expected to do. It has gone in as baseline funding, so it is ongoing in that sense. There is a separate pot of money for setting up CORE. If it was decided not to use the Electoral Commission but to take another route, the money would be available for that process as well. It might be done through EROs to begin with and the money would be available to set up the system. The aim is that this should be a simple process for the EROs. They have their register; they are merely passing it on. When they are updating a register, they are updating CORE as well. It is not anticipated, and neither should it be, that this will be burdensome for EROs. The system has to be set up and they will have to learn how to transfer the information, but it is not meant to be burdensome, and we have sought to make sure that the money is available to local government.