Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 33:"Page 4, line 26, leave out paragraph (b)." The noble Lord said: This is a short amendment to Clause 5. The first subsection states:"““A CORE scheme may make provision as to circumstances in which a payment is to be made””—" either by the CORE keeper to an electoral registration officer within a CORE scheme, or by an electoral registration officer to the CORE keeper. This amendment would delete the second of those. It is a probing amendment to find out under what circumstances the Government believe that payments might be appropriate from electoral registration officers to the national database. CORE will require more funding, as has already been explained to us in commendable detail, as has the fact that funding which involves local authorities would be provided to them through the normal revenue support grant mechanisms. It would not be ring-fenced. Yet it is suggested that some of that money could be sent back up to national level. I suppose I am approaching this as—and I declare an interest as—a typically suspicious local councillor for a district council, and am therefore on the electoral registration authority. The electoral registration officer will obviously have to be funded by the council from its normal funds. There is a general understanding in this Bill that, in many places, EROs have been under-funded in the past, and if we want them to do a better job with more accurate registers and the promotion of voting, et cetera, they must have more money. My question as a local councillor is why some of this money has to be sent back up to national level. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said that he would be in favour of anything which capped the spending of this new set-up, whoever is running it. What worries me is the idea that it will be capped from the Government, who will look to local government EROs to sub them by some means or other. I move this amendment from a localist, suspicious point of view, and look forward to the Minister’s explanations of the possible circumstances in which money would effectively be demanded from local authorities to sub the new CORE scheme. I beg to move.