Political Parties and Elections Bill

The problem essentially, as the noble Lord, Lord Henley, said, is fraud in the postal vote system. We are introducing a system of national rollout to deal with a problem of fraud which exists in very few parts of the country. The most recent case, if I remember rightly, was in Slough and was postal vote fraud. The cases which have been drawn to national attention in recent years have essentially been postal vote cases when people have sought to impersonate others by signing postal vote applications or have taken a number of postal vote ballot papers and signed them on behalf of others without those people knowing what was happening. What would be the effect of the amendment? The local authority would avoid, at all costs, introducing a scheme and inconveniencing millions of people. It would try to sort out the problem locally without the use of the scheme. In the event that it could not sort out the matter locally without the use of the scheme, the local authority would apply to the scheme and it would probably concentrate its use on those wards with a problem, but not necessarily. It might want to apply the scheme throughout the whole of the local authority area. The Government would be able to concentrate additional money on areas with real problems. It would foster intra-ethnic community debate on the need to avoid corruption of the system. In ethnic minority communities, a debate is going on where one group says that another group is not using the electoral system fairly. Arguments are already going on in those areas and individual groups which failed to agree could go to the local authority and ask for action. If the authority felt that there was a serious enough problem, it could apply for an order. It would stop piling up expensive legal responsibilities on local authorities. So what are the arguments against my amendment? It would concentrate effort on ethnic minority communities. What is wrong with that? We already single out ethnic minority community areas for community support projects, employment support programmes, policing resources and literacy programmes, so anyone who somehow, as happened on a previous occasion when this amendment came forward, argues that there is some sort of racist overtone to this has completely misunderstood what is driving it on. It is not racism: it is a desire to deal with the problem in parts of the country where the problem exists. I turn to the issue of data transfer.