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Political Parties and Elections Bill

This is the extent to which I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and thank him for raising these issues. They are relevant. I am afraid that I cannot speak for the official Opposition, and I cannot even speak for the Liberal Democrat Front Bench in this instance. I can speak for me and, like the noble Lord, I am saying what I think, which is the astonishing privilege that we all have in this Committee. Secondly, the system of rolling registers must be reformed so that there is a genuine rolling register. We currently do not have one. We have an annual register which is topped up on a monthly basis by those who bother to do so, and those who are encouraged to do so by political parties when they go around and find that they are not on the electoral register when they ought to be. We need to move to a proper rolling register, topped up by an annual canvas, targeting the houses where people are not registered rather than the other way around. That could be tied in with the national core database. As part of that, which may be controversial, people ought to be on the electoral register once within the United Kingdom. This has implications for votes in local elections, but people ought to say, "This is my principal place of residence, where I am going to be registered as a voter", so that they are on the electoral register once and that is that. That is my personal view.