Electoral Administration Bill

I love the reference to ““Drop The Dead Donkey””—one of my favourite series. I shall have to think on whether I can get in a Damian gag, or a Joy gag, which would be even better. I am grateful to the noble Lord. In Committee, it is important to develop our ideas and to listen to the underlying principles of Members of the Committee. The noble Lord knows well that I have difficulty with a voluntary scheme as a way of piloting or evaluating a compulsory scheme. By its very nature, the one thing you would not be doing is making people give you information. So those groups who would not wish to participate do not have to. That is my problem overall. I have discussed this at great length with Sam Younger who has been very helpful, but I do not think that it gets us to the point that we need to reach. Anything that might affect a person’s ability to vote which we do not test thoroughly is a difficulty. We also need to think carefully about how to address the issues raised in our previous debate—I refer to my noble friend Lord Elder’s amendment. I can see that Members of the Committee seek something which specifically addresses postal voting. That issue, above any, is of great concern and noble Lords want to deal with it as quickly and effectively as possible. That, again, is a continuing theme. Members of the Committee, while not necessarily agreeing with me, take the point that I am trying to make about the difficulty of evaluating voluntary versus evaluating compulsion, which is something we will do. Noble Lords also want a degree of certainty on how we will have been seen to tackle particular issues raised in our discussions effectively. We have to make sure that there is appropriate evaluation of any schemes being tried and tested. We discussed the potential role of the Electoral Commission—I shall say no more; we discussed amending the Bill in our previous deliberations—and making sure that that evaluation is done well. Without wishing to hold up discussions any further, perhaps I may take the noble Lord’s amendment along with that of my noble friend Lord Elder and all other noble Lords to see what, if anything, might be added to where we are. I know that noble Lords have been generous in offering to meet with me between the Committee and Report stages where I hope that we can tie down some of these issues effectively. A clear set of objectives are coming through our Committee debates, which are extremely helpful to me in trying to see what more we might do, although that may not be helpful to the Committee.