Electoral Administration Bill

I was not going to speak until the noble Baroness used those words ““vulnerability of signature””. I have been doing a bit of work on this. The scheme that we are faced with today is in the end intended for national roll out based on signatures and dates of birth; primarily signatures. After the work that I have been doing, my view is that signatures are not a reliable personal identifier. I am not convinced that they will be of much use when rolled out nationally. Unless there is widespread checking, signatures in many areas will be quite useless, because they vary. The reason why I believe that signatures vary is that my signature varies. I photocopied four different documents that I use. One is my Barclays credit card; another is a Barclays premier credit card; another is a driving licence and another is an American Express Nectar card, so that I can get my points. They are all different signatures. The whole system is based on signatures, so are we not effectively bringing in a regime that many electoral registration officers nationally will simply ignore when they realise that signatures do not really mean anything? You will have a concentration on certain individual areas of resource where there is a particular problem, which is dealt with by my amendment. I was pondering this subject this morning. I was not planning to speak on this matter in this debate until the noble Baroness raised it. I rang a bank, and I asked if they could get me some advice on the problems of checking signatures in the banking system. I left the Committee earlier and I rang a Mrs Sandra Quinn of APACS, which is the trade association for payment systems. She said that their members clear 8 million cheques a day and there is very little checking. It is a random system of checking based on risk profile. In other words, built into their system is the consideration that only probably a very small part of banking business requires checking. If that is the case, if we go to national rollout, effectively most of the country will be completely unaffected by the fact that we have introduced individual signatures—so why bother with the system at all on a national rollout basis? We have to concentrate on this when we come to my amendments. When we are considering the value of signatures, we should take into account that for many EROs nationally, where historically there has been no problem, this will be an encumbrance; it will be a burden on the electorate to fill in these forms. Yet, in reality, it will be absolutely useless in electoral administration.