Electoral Administration Bill

I find that utterly extraordinary. Even in the worst conditions of corruption of the electoral system, it is inconceivable that a local authority could be taken over by a majority of people who had manipulated the local electoral registration system to their benefit. In any case, there would be such a sense of outrage in the local community that those people would not be able to sustain the position for long. Even in the worst case imaginable, I cannot think that that would happen. Again, we should call on the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. Can he imagine his area ever being dominated by a group of people, all of whom had been elected on the basis of a distortion of the electoral system? I shall go back to explaining how my amendments would work. Under these arrangements, if a local authority realised that it could not deal with a problem of manipulation of the registration system, it would be able to decide whether it needed to have a scheme. Once the authority had decided to have a scheme, that scheme could take one of two forms. The first, scheme A, could be based on what is to be proposed in the pilot—in effect, the scheme being proposed for national roll-out. However, it would apply only to the local area in question. Alternatively, the authority could adopt a lesser scheme. When I originally drew up the amendment, it was based on the Electoral Commission’s transitional arrangements. I call that one scheme B, although it has now been amended—in my view successfully—by my noble friend Lord Elder in his Amendment No. 80. So the authority would decide to take on the first scheme involving full registration or the lesser system in the second scheme. It would then apply to the Secretary of State for an order to allow it to introduce the scheme. The Secretary of State would have to apply to the Electoral Commission. In turn, while the commission could not determine what was to happen, it could advise the Secretary of State on whether it believed that the scheme being applied for was sufficient to deal with the particular local problem. The question to ask is this: what would be the resulting benefit for the local community? My view is that, first, local authorities would avoid like the plague introducing a scheme and thus having to make an application for an order. Rather, they would direct into those wards with a particular problem—as I say, nationally there are very few of them—as many resources as possible to try to avoid applying for a scheme. They would do that because they would not want to have to make such an application. To do so would be to recognise that they had failed to deal with the problem internally. Wherever possible, they would avoid applying for an order and they would try to sort out the problem themselves. Secondly, the very fact that a power existed for a local authority to apply for such an order would generate within those communities where there is a problem a debate about the right way forward and whether it could be dealt with internally, either directly by the community itself or indirectly by the local authority, which then would not have to resort to applying for an order. Thirdly, the proposal would avoid inconveniencing millions of people and would save even more millions of pounds. There are major public expenditure implications, such as that which I raised with my noble friend before about signatures. We are proposing to spend billions of pounds in making the national identity card system secure. It will cost a lot more than £10 million or £20 million to make the system more secure just to protect the signatures. However, we are going down this route without understanding the cost implications—with CORE, which comes into all this—of introducing a system whose security will be very expensive to maintain. The amendments that I have just talked about basically leave the existing system of national registration intact—with a few amendments such as those in Clause 9 on duties and responsibilities of electoral registration officers—apart from in those areas where there is a particular problem that needs to be addressed. However, Amendments Nos. 77 and 78 take the Electoral Commission’s proposals for a transitional scheme and graft on the back of them the proposals that I have set out in relation to the previous amendments. If I had seen Amendment No. 80 earlier, I would have used that amendment as the background framework on which to graft the amendment for the local authority schemes to be introduced. Finally, I should say that if I am a bit shaky on my feet, it is because I am under an attack of the inflammatory disease that hits me every few months, which is not making it easy for me to speak today. I think that I have said all that I need to say at this stage. I beg to move.