Electoral Administration Bill

I strongly support Amendment No. 61, moved by my noble friend Lord Greaves. We are now in an important part of the Bill—Part 3—with a set of anti-fraud measures that the public are looking to us to provide, as all Members of the Committee will agree. The integrity and accuracy of the register is obviously absolutely critical to this. It may seem that these reforms to make the registration process more secure and effective are not that urgent. However, I believe that they could be even more urgent than they at first appear. We may be too late for this year’s local authority elections, but who knows what elections may be on the immediate horizon? I notice, as the Minister may have noticed, that yesterday a Minister from the Department for Constitutional Affairs told the other place:"““As for the reform of the House of Lords, he will wish to know that we look forward to proceeding with change there very speedily indeed””.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/3/06; col. 27.]" The phrase ““very speedily indeed”” is, perhaps, not one that we usually expect to hear from Ministers but, in the current circumstances, perhaps that is a very heavy hint. Clearly, the Government at last recognise that it is urgent to disentangle membership of this House of Parliament from the honours system. That must mean that at least a majority of Members are elected. The sooner it becomes evident to the public that membership of the legislature must be earned with hundreds of thousands of votes, rather than bought with hundreds of thousands of pounds, the sooner all suspicions of corruption will be dispelled. To speed the process, I invite Ministers to re-examine the draft Second Chamber of Parliament Bill, which I presented last year with the support—