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Mr. Forth: I am sure that you will advise me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that this is not the occasion for me to tell the House that the fact that a colleague of mine apparently served on some obscure working party commits me in any way. I am sure that you would advise me that Third Reading would be the time for me to tell the House why I feel in no way bound by a colleague who, unbeknown to me, conspires with the Government in a working party to give this measure a spurious urgency that I do not understand and that has not yet been explained to me. Those points will come later and I cannot wait for Third Reading to make them. I hope that it will not be too long before we reach Third Reading because I am dying to make that speech.
This is the occasion for us to concentrate our thoughts narrowly on clause 9 and the new clause moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway).
Mr. William Ross (East Londonderry):
The right hon. Gentleman says that, according to the Government, he seems to have been committed to the measure by a member of the Conservative party. The Ulster Unionist party was not committed to it by anyone because we were
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) said that he could not wait for Third Reading. I am afraid that he will have to do so.
Mr. Forth:
As ever, you are right, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
I make it clear from the start that I welcome the new clause. It gives me pleasure to say that I welcome it--
Mr. Bercow:
Unalloyed pleasure.
Mr. Forth:
Certainly. In his usual analytical but forceful way, my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale has illustrated all too well the weakness that regrettably still exists in clause 9. He has done us a great service in that respect, because doing so usefully puts in context the sense of urgency that he inexplicably introduced into the proceedings. It gives us the occasion to pause and reconsider whether we are wise to allow clause 9 to proceed in its present form.
The new clause therefore gives us the opportunity to find out from the Minister, if we can, not only the answers to the many questions my hon. Friend rightly posed but whether it would be helpful to include new clauses for the reasons that he gave and one or two others that I could modestly add. The more I read clause 9, the more delphic I find it. That would be worrying enough in any Bill, but it is more worrying in a Bill proposing radical changes to our electoral procedures. I hope to catch your eye on Third Reading, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as I will want to expatiate on why the Bill is unnecessary and dangerous. However, I will leave that until later.
In the meantime, I want to concentrate on clause 9 and try to get from the Minister a clearer idea of what its provisions mean. The clause is tantalisingly long, but almost equally opaque. It does not reveal--as it should--either the intention or the effect of the proposals. The House has already spent considerable time on Second Reading and in Committee speculating on why we are to have this bifurcated register, and to what purposes it might be put. The fact that we are still speculating illustrates the difficulties in which the House may find itself.
Clause 9, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale is seeking to strengthen with the new clause, says that "provisions" should be made. That is a generous but vague word, which allows any amount of latitude to the Secretary of State of the day. The clause states that provisions will be made
The form of words in the Bill is completely without meaning or substance. The Bill says that something will happen in the future which will give rise to an explanation
of the purposes of something that we do not yet understand. That is what the House is being asked to accept in this important Bill, and it is not good enough.
The clause goes on, with impudence of the highest order, to say that the provisions will ascertain what is requested by or on behalf of such persons. We have the ultimate in legislative nonsense, with the Bill using a form of words which tells us nothing and leads us nowhere.
Mr. Bercow:
I endorse my right hon. Friend's enthusiasm for the new clause. Is not it absolutely typical that the clause that the Government are defending has been drawn up by a Department which, according to my immediate calculation, contains four Ministers--the Home Secretary, two Ministers of State and an Under- Secretary--who are lawyers?
Mr. Forth:
That frightening thought may go some way to explaining our difficulties. However, our job on Report is to get ourselves out of those difficulties, and recognising them is an important first step. My hon. Friend, who will have listened carefully to my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale's excellent introduction, may not have been reassured to be told that this nonsense is the outcome of a working party which produced a consensus and led to the urgency with which the Bill is being rushed through the House today.
All of these words--"working parties", "consensus" and the spurious "urgency"--would make me suspicious about a Bill on any subject. However, this is where the new clause may come to our rescue. My hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale was persuasive, but it will take some considerable effort by the Minister to persuade me to support the Bill, although I do support the new clause. The doubts about the Bill, and its flaws, are evident.
The advantage of the new clause is that before we are led astray by the looseness of the drafting of the Bill--and before the peculiar provisions alluded to in clause 9 lead to a miasma of inexplicable verbiage--we will be rescued, in part, by the draft to be published and by the time that my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale, in his sagacity, has allowed for that process.
Mr. Greenway:
Does my right hon. Friend agree that a draft of the regulations before us would be a considerable improvement on what we have now, which is nothing?
Mr. Forth:
My hon. Friend is right. The irony is that the Government, who have told us so much about the virtues of pre-legislative activity and the strengthening of legislation by being open, have produced the antithesis of that--unless my hon. Friend believes that the working party, of which one of our colleagues was a member, did all the pre-legislative work.
Mr. Forth:
That reassures me. We have a degree of reassurance with the safety net in the new clause, which may help us to correct a fundamental weakness in clause 9.
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Faversham and Mid-Kent):
I have not taken a close interest in the progress of the Bill,
Mr. Forth:
My hon. Friend is as perceptive as ever, and he may have heard my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale asking a similar question. The fact that we still have to pose such a fundamental question illustrates the extent to which we have got ourselves into difficulties with the Bill. Notwithstanding the working party and the consensus--I am beginning to wonder how real that consensus was--the Minister has failed to answer that fundamental question. That leads me to the conclusion that unless we get a satisfactory answer, the House may not want the Bill to proceed and should find a way to send it back for further consideration.
I shall encapsulate my views by saying that I believe that the fundamental weaknesses and inadequacies of clause 9 can be partially corrected by new clause 1. On that basis, I am prepared to support the new clause, although I await the Minister's comments. I remain to be convinced of the necessity for, or viability and benefit of, the Bill.
Mr. Maclean:
I was prompted to take an interest in clause 9 and new clause 1 because of the Minister's comments in the debate last week. I do not blame the Minister personally because he has to carry the departmental brief, and the Government as a whole are responsible for the extreme haste with which clause 9 was produced despite their not having thought through the consequences. The Minister answered concerns raised by Labour Members about direct marketing and credit checking. He said:
"specifying a form of words".
That means that almost anything can be written into the provisions. It goes on to state that the provisions specifying the form of words will explain to those registered or applying to be registered
"the purposes for which the edited register might be used".
If that is not a circular argument, I do not know what is.
5.45 pm
"We are discussing the detail of that with the industry. It is our intention that the full register shall not be completely available to the direct marketing industry. However, we are examining with the industry ways in which credit issues can be better resolved."
We are about to reach Third Reading of an important Bill that deals with the registration of electors, and the House should not be faced with such a clause as clause 9 which is, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) said, completely inexplicable. It is so ambiguous that it could mean anything that any Minister wants it to mean, depending on what sort of regulations he wishes to produce or what sort of mood he is in.
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