Electoral Administration Bill

The point that I was making was that the act of registering from a household may compromise the confidentiality of the personal identifiers on the part of individuals, when they may wish to keep them confidential. Once personal identifiers are provided, they are to be kept confidential and they cannot be supplied to other people by the registration officer except under special circumstances, which are set out. They are regarded as confidential, yet that confidentiality may be compromised at the beginning. If a person in a large household, particularly an HMO, has access to signatures, dates of birth and any other identifiers that may be used, and is able to make a record of those before sending them in, that severely compromises the use of those personal identifiers to stop postal voting fraud. It is perfectly easy for them to tick the box on the form saying that those people have applied for a postal vote, to apply for a postal vote on their behalf or even, if postal votes are applied for by the elector concerned, to intercept those postal ballots when they arrive. If people have copies of signatures and know the dates of birth, it would make it very easy for them to turn their HMO into a vote factory. This is an important question about registration under personal identifiers, and the amendment probes how the Government see this operating to maintain confidentiality and security. Amendment No. 69 is much simpler. It tries to ensure that, instead of just the date of birth, the commonly accepted date of birth could be accepted. A remarkable number of people living in this country who are entitled to vote do not know their actual date of birth because they were born in places where birth certificates and registration as we know them here did not exist, and in some places still do not exist. My wife teaches classes of people from the south Asian subcontinent, a remarkable proportion of whom put their date of birth as 1 January in the nearest year that they can guess they were born in. I want to be clear that they will not be deprived of a vote because they have a putative date of birth and not necessarily the actual one. Amendment No. 71 probes what other identifiers, apart from date of birth and signature, the Government are thinking of. It asks why there is specific provision that those other identifiers might be dispensed with. It is really to find out what all this means; it is all a fog to me. Amendment No. 72 is perhaps more substantively important. At the moment, Clause 14(9) states:"““A registration officer may disclose the information obtained as mentioned in subsection (8)””," meaning personal identifiers, in various other circumstances. One of those, in paragraph (c), is,"““any person exercising functions in relation to the preparation or conduct of legal proceedings under the Representation of the People Acts””." I do not understand what that means. I specifically want to ask whether it applies to people carrying out functions,"““in relation to the preparation or conduct of legal proceedings””," in order to challenge elections. Does it apply only to people acting in an official capacity, or would it apply to a candidate, an agent or person whom they have engaged in order to bring a petition to overturn an election at an election court? If it does, it seems that it drives a cart and horses through confidentiality. If it does not, it is difficult to know how those seeking to prove an election fraudulent can so do if they do not have access to that information. It may be that some sort of privileged access to the information could be arranged on a confidential basis. I do not understand how it would work but, having been involved in looking at fraudulent elections, I know how important it is that signatures, in particular, can be looked at and checked; they are crucial to showing—or suggesting—that an election has not been carried out fairly. This is an important amendment and an important question for the Minister. Finally, I have an objection to ““catch-all”” phrases. The fourth category of people who may get this information are, under paragraph (d),"““such other persons for such other purposes as may be prescribed””." Can the Minister at least tell us what sort of ““such other persons”” and ““such other purposes”” the Government think could be prescribed to get the detailed confidential information on personal identifiers? The final amendment in this group, Amendment No. 84, is a bit further along in the Bill and is really a separate issue. It is an attempt to probe, where pilots are put forward by a local authority, what sort of areas might be appropriate for pilots, and whether a local authority that is not an electoral registration authority should be able to put forward a pilot—for example, a county council or, as is suggested, the GLA. Should they be able to put forward a pilot where all the donkey work, administration and difficulties would be carried by, respectively, the district council or a London borough? Some of those district councils or boroughs may not feel competent to do it and may have other priorities for elections, such as getting their registers in good order. Is it sensible for a county council, for example, to be able to impose this on a district without the district being willing to do it, or is it the Government’s intention that districts under these circumstances would effectively have a veto? If they do not, it could lead to all sorts of difficulties at local level, with people having pilots which they do not want and cannot do. I beg to move.