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Electoral Administration Bill

The debate is yet further evidence of the lack of consensus on individual registration and personal identifiers. Amendments Nos. 4 to 9 would put pilots of personal identifiers on a compulsory and regional basis. New clause 5, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) said, would prevent the rolling out of personal identifiers on a permanent and nationwide basis without further primary legislation. Let me deal first with amendments Nos. 4 to 9. The Government believe that, when a new system is tested, there is a balance to be struck between ensuring that it is tested on a large enough scale for the results to be meaningful and not taking unnecessary risks. Members will be aware that, for previous electoral pilots, we initially conducted tests at voluntary and local level. When we were confident that the system was ready to be used more widely, we scaled it up. What we have not done is to move to a regional scale without being clear that the benefits outweigh the risks. The potential benefit of personal identifiers is an increase in the security of the electoral process. We are doing much to address this issue and personal identifiers may help us to do more. There is a risk of a significant drop in the number of people registered to vote. As we have heard repeatedly, in excess of 3.5 million people already cannot vote because they are not registered and we do not intend to exacerbate the problem. Through pilots, we hope to measure the impact of identifiers in terms of both benefits and risks. We believe that a voluntary and local scheme will allow us to do that effectively. In our view, a compulsory regional scheme would attract an unacceptable level of risk, while not providing significantly more information about how the new system would operate.