Electoral Administration Bill

I thank the Minister for that detailed reply and all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. It strikes me that we are not a million miles apart on this. In terms of personal identifiers, the Bill states ““one or two””. I think that the Committee is moving away from ““a”” and towards ““and””, in that we are talking about at least a signature and a date of birth. We would add the third identifier, the national insurance number, as being something which everyone has to have. They must have one for income tax purposes apart from anything else. Most people have to use their national insurance number during the year for other purposes and ought to know it. It is a reasonably secure and recognisable identifier. This is a fruitful area for further discussion. Clearly there is a slight mismatch on the view of the Electoral Commission on the national insurance number. The noble Baroness thinks the commission took one view while I think it took the other. But it does not matter. We need to have this debate because what we are all looking for is security in the voting procedure. I want to make only a couple of points because I know that we shall return to these issues on the next occasion. It is one of the most important parts of the Bill. The Minister has rehearsed her view on the question of pilots, but I am still more inclined to suggest that we should test part of the voting system itself. If we tried individual identifiers on people who want to vote by post first, that would take place pretty much across the country and could be worked from there. I am still more in favour of that than holding a lot of individual pilots as suggested by certain local authorities—or even having to manipulate some authorities into participating. There is a clean and clear way of conducting this on the postal vote. The question of whether the register dipped in Northern Ireland when national insurance numbers had to be produced is interesting. It can be looked at through both ends of the telescope. It can be suggested that perhaps it dipped because people should not have been on the register at all and that having flushed them out of the system, you then began to get a true view of the electoral numbers. I am not sure that I am bothered about that.