Electoral Administration Bill

One fundamental problem strikes me as a result of the exchange with the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. On paper, the provisions look fine, but the problem is the triggering mechanism. On the first day of Committee when we were talking about the prospect of fraud in local elections, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, got to his feet and asked where the evidence was. That is the fundamental problem with this group of amendments. Where will the evidence come from? The noble Lord is proposing that the local authority should trigger this and put in the application. But the local authority is the beneficiary of the existing arrangements, so I cannot quite see that it would necessarily be that keen—apart from the reasons that he touched on—and I would have thought that it would try to hide the problem rather than to clean up its act. I am not sure that there is the right triggering mechanism to bring this into effect. There are other problems, but that is a fundamental problem with what the noble Lord is proposing.