Electoral Administration Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, for giving me the chance to explain a bit more. Absolutely nothing we are doing seeks to punish anyone, as the noble Lord described it, by not allowing them to get on the register. We do not support the noble Lord’s amendment for two reasons. We are seeking to establish that there may be vulnerable people—perhaps under the witness protection scheme, but more likely those subject to domestic violence—who need to remain anonymous for obvious reasons that I do not need to tell any Member of the Committee about. I will come on to the evidence shortly, but we want to ensure that they are able to exercise their democratic right to vote in safe way. In a sense, we need to entice them to feel safe about putting themselves forward. We do that by guaranteeing anonymity, so that they cannot be found. Noble Lords will know that those who seek to find those who are in danger will find all sorts of ways of doing so. We fear that if we say, ““If you apply for anonymous registration and fail, then we will automatically put you on the open register””, it would deter those who genuinely need to be on the anonymous register from applying. If I were in danger, and I wanted to exercise my democratic right, I would be nervous about somebody else making the decision that I had failed the test and would automatically go onto the open register. It would be a deterrent, which we do not want. If the request to go on the anonymous register fails, the person would be sent the annual canvass form in due course, in the normal way. We are not preventing them from getting on to the register, we are simply saying that we will not do it automatically, so that we do not deter genuine applicants who are inevitably fearful in any event, and need to be encouraged and supported to do it.