Electoral Administration Bill

Some of us bear the scars from the Bill to introduce the pilots. The noble Lord, Lord Evans of Temple Guiting, is not in his place, but he will remember it very well. I do not want to go back over all that. It is all anecdotal and about a feeling of what happens in your own area as you observe it, but I think that things such as parents voting for their student children who have a postal vote at home, or one member of a couple voting for their wife or husband, take place in extensive postal voting much more than people recognise. As I said, we had the opportunity in the pilots to do the research. Some of us asked for that research, but it was not done because the Electoral Commission, in its wisdom, thought that it was unnecessary. My point is that the real value of personal identifiers and, possibly, more individual registration will be in cutting the number of people voting for someone else, not on an organised, fraudulent basis but just because it is in-home and easy within the system. The proposals could discourage that, although they will not abolish it. We now come down to some different models of how we may pilot these things. The Government want to pilot them in certain areas. My noble friends, supported, I hope, by the Conservatives, are now going for piloting on postal voting, while the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, proposes a different way to do it. Postal voting is an important part of the whole question; in my view, it is at the heart of the problem of fiddling votes—whether at a very small scale within a family in a quite benign way where people do not think that they are doing anything wrong, or at the sort of scale about which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, talks. My view is firmly that my noble friends have the right line here, but we will come to decisions on this when the Bill returns to the House.