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European Parliamentary Elections (Northern Ireland) (Amendment) Regulations 2009

I thank the noble Baroness for that very clear and concise presentation of what, at first sight, looks like a pretty horrendous provision. As she explained, in fact, it makes a lot of changes to a number of Bills. We have been regularly legislating for elections in Northern Ireland over the past five years, and I believe that now we have probably come ahead of the field in Europe. We have as sound and good a system as anywhere, and it is certainly better than the rest of the United Kingdom on all fronts; that is for sure. I am happy about that. The recent changes seem to be down to good sense. On removing the 30 people who have to vouch for a candidate, it is understood that the fact that the candidate has to put up £5,000 is probably a big enough deterrent to stop him playing the fool as a candidate and messing up the election. The question of releasing information is probably a concern in Northern Ireland more than in other parts, because there are two, three or four parties, or sometimes eight, and everyone assumes that the officials are biased and are going to help one party more than another, and so on. That certainly happened from time to time in elections in Northern Ireland. The parties wanted to know how many voting papers had been released, and sometimes they were told and sometimes they were not told. It may have depended on which party wanted to know and which did not, or on what the presiding officer felt at the time. Now, under the present legislation as a result of this instrument, as I understand it, the senior presiding officer will decree that this information will be released twice during the day, at 11 o’clock in the morning and 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and it will be done in all the polling stations at the same time and in the same manner, I hope. I am getting nods from behind the Minister. That has to be a plus. This is a good order. I thank the officials for briefing me beforehand, when I was able to ask a number of questions. This is a long order, and we have had a lot of electoral law recently. Are there any plans to consolidate all the amendments and different electoral legislation for our little province into one statute? It would be very handy for all those concerned with managing elections. I support this statutory instrument.