Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am sorry if I slightly disappoint my noble friend by saying simply that the problem with his amendment is that it tries to put the genie back into the bottle, which, nine years after it was let out, is rather hard. I confessed earlier that we made a mistake in 2000 in allowing the extension of postal voting on demand without the proper safeguards that we should have insisted on at the time. Having done that, our real priority now is to make as rapid progress as possible with a system of personal identifiers to avoid some of the potential for abuse which is clear in the system now. We made some significant progress on this issue with the Electoral Administration Act 2006: we now insist, for example, on the signature and the date of birth accompanying the application to vote by post, and we have got rid of the witness signature form, which was sometimes an even bigger barrier to people being able to vote by post than the problems which my noble friend has indicated so far. Five years ago, in the 2004 elections, I led the opposition in this House to what I called compulsory postal voting when the Government extended what they called pilots and introduced all-postal voting in the northern half of England for the European and local elections. I did so when this House defeated the other place on five occasions, an almost unprecedented number. I said in argument that it was wrong to have compulsory postal voting and that people should have a choice as to whether to vote by post or at a polling station in the traditional manner. It now seems it would be quite unpopular to take away the option of voting by post but I emphasise the need to move rapidly on the issue of personal identifiers, otherwise we will have to return to my noble friend’s amendment if we do not make further progress on improving the security of the process.