Electoral Administration Bill

I am being very careful with what I say because I do not want to use parliamentary privilege to say things that I would not say outside. Things might be different now, because the whole understanding of the problem is different. I think that that is so locally as well as nationally. The point that I was going on to make is that what I call ““small-scale benign postal-vote fiddling”” is a much greater problem than people accept. I had a conversation with a gentleman. I cannot remember his name, but he is a Conservative Member of Parliament for one of the Trafford constituencies. We were discussing this issue on Granada Television some time ago. He was telling me that in the all-postal pilots in Trafford, which were generally thought to have been quite successful, there was a very clear increase in the number of households where everybody voted. In households where normally two or three out of four people on the register voted, in the all-postal pilot, everyone voted. I regret that when we had the all-postal pilots in the European and local elections, more research was not done locally into how the voting patterns at a micro-level were affected. More research should have been done by going back to question some of those electors and conducting on-the-ground academic research. The research that was done was opinion polling that asked people if they found the process convenient or were happy with it. That was the wrong sort of research. We missed a real opportunity there, having had those pilots.