Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that extremely intelligent and useful intervention, which demonstrates the very point that I am making. If we do not establish criteria, there is nothing by which the court, in a judicial action in administrative law, would be able to judge what was going on in the official's mind. Is it to be merely a matter of opinion or is it to be a matter of judgment by certain criteria? I notice that those on the Front Bench are watching me with some interest. I have been watching them with much interest throughout the proceedings as we were moving towards clause 6, but we were not getting there, so we will have to see. I am sure my hon. Friend and others want more elucidation on the point. We get used to the fact that some legislation states ““where, in the opinion of a Minister”” and subsequently says that the proceedings shall not be challenged in any legal proceedings whatsoever. That occurs in another interesting and somewhat controversial Bill, the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, which I do not need to go into today because we will have plenty of opportunity to examine it on another occasion. If the provision merely states that if the officer thinks there is a reason to doubt the accuracy of the counting of the votes in the counting officer's voting area, and does not say ““in the opinion of””, we are using different language from the language that the courts are used to in administrative legal challenges, which is the precise wording, well established in the courts and in administrative law, ““if, in the opinion of the officer, there is a reason to doubt the accuracy of the counting of the votes””. As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South made clear at the beginning, this is a matter of great importance when there is a knife-edge vote. He mentioned the experience of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) in relation to elections. We must bear it in mind that the Bill is not just about an election. It is about a referendum with a range of percentages that may be applied as a result of the threshold provisions. Those will become highly controversial in the context of clause 6, which we will reach later on—much later on.