Electoral Administration Bill

I am sure that I am out of order, but I wonder whether the Committee would agree that the noble Lord could remain seated when he speaks. It seems to me that for him to have to stand up is a quite unnecessary burden; we will hear his points perfectly well. I will not be quite so kind in reply to the noble Lord’s amendments. There are great difficulties with just making this a spot matter, which is what it would have to be. You could see a situation with a small part of a local area potentially suffering from bouts of corruption, and a local authority not wanting to grasp that problem for a number of reasons. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, in this respect. We are, in a way, having to take an elephant to crack a nut. It is a question of how you crack that nut. We know that there is corruption; that has been demonstrated in the postal voting system. We are most worried about cases where people are not themselves going to polling stations but are using a postal or proxy vote, so that you have not got the person in front of you to enable you to identify what is going on. While I think that the system proposed in the Bill is cumbersome, there is frankly no alternative but to have it nationally. We could go back through the debate we had over CORE and argue whether it is necessary to have a centralised computer system. We picked our way through that earlier in Committee, but it is one of the big questions that we have not answered: whether you are required to put these registers into one system. If you did not, and you remained on a local level, you would rule out many of the problems that have been raised about identifiers, because you could have systems which simply excluded anything but the name so that people could not read the identifiers. That is diverting a bit into something that may come up on Report. We earlier discussed the drop in registration. The Minister said that there was evidence that registration had gone down in Northern Ireland and that, indeed, it had gone down again once the register had been cleaned up. Again, that is a point of whether you worry more about the register dropping or being clean. To do this on a local basis—having to get the evidence from a local newspaper that has got a bit of a fly going on a particular part of its community—could conjure up all sorts of unpleasant things, especially if the problem is identified as being entirely an ethnic minority one, with schemes then being locally targeted at them. That outcome would be unfortunate. We must therefore look at a national scheme; I do not see any other way.