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

I, too, thank the noble Baroness the Lord President for introducing this instrument. I welcome the decision to hold the suspension of the count at 11 pm. For Northern Ireland Assembly district council elections, that makes sense. I also agree that it is right to abolish the need for the subscription of nomination papers; the idea that you had to have a proposer, a seconder and 28 others seems to be over-elaborate, and this is a useful change. The Government have insisted that the broad thrust of this legislation is to bring Northern Ireland’s electoral legislation fully into line with the rest of the United Kingdom. The proposal, which has a lot of common sense behind it, that there should be a regulation for the release of information by presiding officers on the number of ballots issued during the day, and that guidance should come from the chief electoral officer essentially controlling that, in a way takes Northern Ireland away from the UK model. I understand that the Electoral Commission had some concerns on that score, and I would be grateful if the Minister would comment on that point. It is not that I have any serious reservation about the proposal, which seems to be a wise one, but it slightly conflicts with the broader logic of government policy in this respect. The point has also been made that it is government policy that legislation affecting elections should not be introduced less than six months before an election. This seems to be an exception, even if one accepts that in this case the legislation is basically sound. I have one final query, which relates to an issue that arose some weeks ago when the Minister was putting through the legislation that she referred to earlier with respect to the Northern Ireland Assembly elections and by-elections. This is slightly outside the remit of the legislation that we are considering today, but it is intimately connected with her answer to me on that day and to a lacuna in this legislation. I asked her to defend the arrangement that by-elections would not be held in the case of Assembly elections. I was enormously convinced by her reply, which is that in the case of Northern Ireland, for a number of reasons, a by-election could produce a distorting outcome. That is even more so in the case of a European election. Should a nationalist republican—who would in all likely circumstances be elected as one of the three candidates—be run over by the proverbial bus and we had a by-election, which, as I understand it, is the current regulation, it is almost certain that there would then be a unionist victory in the by-election. The sensitivity that the Minister displayed, rightly, in her reply to me in the case of the Assembly elections, for the way in which by-elections could lead to a distorting result and an unfair outcome is even more marked, potentially, with respect to European elections. That is outside the scope of these regulations, extensive though they are. I would like to have a sense that the Government are aware of the difficulty; that is really all that I am asking for this afternoon. There is a potential problem on this score. I thank the noble Baroness for introducing the statutory instrument, which is essentially sound and viable.