My Lords, this is a very important amendment. I want to make two points. First, we have already spent a great deal of time talking about the purposes of higher education and the desire to see fully educated, rather than just trained, people going into society and playing their part. Elections are occasions that provide real opportunities, so if we are serious about our earlier discussions on this Bill, logically we ought to ensure that everything possible is being done to enable students to participate.
My second point is simply that it is most important for society as a whole to ensure that we have the fullest possible participation in elections. There should be no unnatural hindrances whatever. While we should of course have safeguards—I am the first to agree with that—we want to make sure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to participate as they should. Students have a particularly important contribution to make in the democratic process. Therefore this amendment makes absolute sense, in terms of both achieving our objectives as a democratic society with full participation and making sense of what we talked about at great length earlier in our deliberations: we want students to become fully participating and informed citizens.