Electoral Administration Bill

If I can go backwards through the amendments, on Amendment No. 84, the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, was very perceptive. She noticed that when I turned to that page of the amendments I started to talk to the wrong amendment but very rapidly started talking to the right amendment. She will get a tick for that on her performance assessment; no doubt we will all have those in due course. I am grateful for what the Minister said, but I would have liked it to have been stronger. If in a registration authority both the registration officer and the local authority feel strongly that they are not capable of conducting a pilot, and if perhaps two or three London boroughs thought that they could not cope with it, it would be wrong to impose it. Let us take a hypothetical situation where a highly competent authority such as Kensington and Chelsea might say that it could not handle a pilot because it was dealing with HMO problems, getting the register in order, and the millions of languages that the noble Baroness was talking about last week. I notice, for the benefit of the tape, as they say, that the Minister is agreeing with me—