Electoral Administration Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord. On Amendment No. 90A, he has recognised that we sought that for elections to parish or community councils we should have a power that says we could exclude them from the need to use personal identifiers, just because we were concerned not to do anything that might be perceived to be disproportionate for polls on a very small scale. I take the point that the noble Lord is making that as people get used to it that will become the norm. As elections are going on at district level and parish level at the same time, you would use identifiers. It would not be that you needed it for one and not the other. It was simply that when a very small-scale election is going on, we thought that it was worth having a power in the Bill to make using identifiers unnecessary. The noble Lord looks puzzled; I am not surprised. I will take this away, if I might. It was meant to give us some flexibility for those circumstances. I wonder whether noble Lords have views on this. I do not feel that we need to push it to any great lengths. I am keen, as always with primary legislation, that we keep as much flexibility as we can. It would be in those circumstances alone where it might apply. On Amendment No. 90B, as the noble Lord has said, Clause 17(7) covers the rules relating to the conduct of various types of election that would be affected by the introduction of personal identifiers. Obviously, the pilots necessarily involve a degree of experimentation. If the pilots show that personal identifiers should be rolled out, but that some degree of modification to the provision was needed, Clause 17(2) provides the necessary flexibility to allow for that. I am sure that the noble Lord will appreciate that is quite important. Clause 17(7), which allows for subsequent consequential changes to be made to subordinate legislation, is also necessary to allow for that flexibility in terms of the roll-out. This has been through the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which said that this power was appropriate because we need to have the flexibility. Otherwise, it would be difficult to amend what may, in a small way, be what we have been testing to make sure that we can roll it out appropriately and do not delay unnecessarily while we brought it back for legislation.