Electoral Administration Bill

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham. We want a national scheme. It is entirely wrong that there should be any difference between constituencies, districts or whatever in the country. We recognise that, with the Government’s proposals for a pilot scheme, there will be differences for a limited time, which we do not welcome. We would be far more hostile, however, to any scheme that basically made this a permanent system. We recognise that, if an order is made on a particular local authority, under the scheme of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, the need to require a personal identifier would apply to everybody on the register in that constituency or district, whatever their ethnic background. Nevertheless, in the current circumstances, we would almost certainly end up with a system whereby it would be much more likely that the order for personal identifiers would be made in areas with a large ethnic minority group than in areas where there were no, or few, members of ethnic minorities. This, frankly, would inevitably be seen as racist, so we cannot support it. I also see more practical difficulties. For instance, in many places in London, the parliamentary constituencies cross the borough boundaries. One would then have a difficult situation. In the case of a parliamentary constituency located partly in one borough which had applied for an order and partly in a borough which had not, what would happen to voters in that constituency? I believe that it is far more likely than the noble Lord admits that these problems could arise. For example, let us take a group which had won control of several safe wards quite genuinely, but its majority was dependent on fixing the vote in a small number of marginal wards. It would be perfectly possible for the majority party on a local authority to be unwilling to apply for an order which would take away the advantage that it gains by manipulating the system. I do not need to say anything more. It is inevitable that we cannot support these amendments.