My Lords, I too very much enjoyed the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Moore—sadly, he is not here right now. Today was the first time we have been in the same room together, but during the Brexit referendum we had a long telephone conversation. Afterwards, he wrote in one of his papers, “I had a conversation with Simon Woolley. I profoundly disagree with him, but he does seem like a rather nice chap”.
I wish to focus on three aspects of this Bill: voter ID, voter registration and citizenship. I would also like it to be known that I will seek to make two amendments to this important legislation if I get the chance.
First, there is almost zero case for our democracy to introduce voter ID to tackle fraud. In the last election, there were six convictions for voter ID fraud, with nearly 48 million people having voted. I tried to work out the percentages for that, but I gave up. It was too complicated—there were too many noughts.