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Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2008

My Lords, the Minister is absolutely right; I should have noticed that it said the following two motions and not the third. I will withdraw my question in relation to the third until later. However, I should like to come back to the general point I wanted to make. In an order that we took fairly recently, which was taken by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, was in the Chamber at the time—I referred to the remarkable achievement of the late, great Lord Williams of Mostyn. At the time of the Second Reading debate on the legislation at the beginning of this millennium, which had come to us without having been amended in any way in the Commons, Mr Desmond Browne, now Secretary of State for Defence, was the Parliamentary Secretary handling it in the Commons. It is fair to say that he did not have the weight at that point to be able to tell the Northern Ireland Office what to do about the points that were being raised. I can remember specifically during the Second Reading debate referring to recent cases in Fermanagh and Tyrone, the counties singled out by Winston Churchill in a famous statement just after the First World War—not much changes in the history of the Province. However, Lord Williams of Mostyn went back to the Northern Ireland Office and turned the Bill upside down between Second Reading and Third Reading in this House. My noble friend Lord Glentoran was right to pay tribute to the present legislation as being, historically, the most copper-bottomed in the whole of the United Kingdom in this regard. When we had the Statement on the elections and funding the other day, I allowed myself the observation that the Government’s attitude on postal voting seemed in recent years to have been Panglossian. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, from the Government Front Bench said I was being a little hard on the Government. However, the fact remains that when the postal arrangements have been criticised, the Government have either wrung their hands and said that there was no time to legislate before the next election or, if in the middle of an election, they would assure us when ugly reports surfaced about these matters that everything would be all right on the night—a confidence later disproved by events. I agree that postal fraud in the United Kingdom is apparently limited to certain parts of the country, but anywhere is too much. The barrister who investigated the Birmingham cases some years back said, as I recall, that the rules and practices were worthy of a banana republic. That embarrasses us all; democracy is too precious to be left open to fraud and raising the turnout is not, in itself, a sufficient justification. However, Northern Ireland owes a very great deal to the late, great Lord Williams of Mostyn for the legislation that he put on the statute book.