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Mr. Greenway: With all due respect to the hon. Gentleman, will he explain why, before the debate started, my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) received a response from the Prime Minister saying that he would reply to my hon. Friend in due
course, but it was only after I had left the Chamber at 6.30 pm that the Minister's written answer to me was available on the letter board?
Mr. O'Brien: If the hon. Gentleman had done the normal thing and checked with the Library, as other Members feel able to do, he would have found that the regulatory impact assessment is there, and that his claim that we are trying to sneak something past the House is entirely illegitimate.
The hon. Gentleman also claimed that the pilot schemes were originally supposed to be only for local elections, but are now intended for parliamentary elections. Let us be clear about this--the pilot schemes will be involved only in local elections, and only after an affirmative resolution of the House can particular procedures be extended to parliamentary elections. That means that there would be further debate and a further vote in the House before that happened.
We do not intend to proceed unilaterally. The legitimacy of our electoral procedures depends on agreement between the major parties that the voting procedure is valid, and we would want broad support before changing it. We certainly would not want to try to push things through in an illegitimate way. We have been clear about that all along. The hon. Gentleman's claim has no teeth.
Mr. Greenway:
Will the Minister give way?
Mr. O'Brien:
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman one last time.
Mr. Greenway:
I shall not intervene again, but what the Minister is saying appears to be extremely important. Is he saying that, whatever the experience of the pilot schemes, which, if the Bill is passed, will be launched in May, and notwithstanding the powers that the Home Secretary is taking in clause 11--powers which go far beyond anything that the working party proposed, and which certainly were not contained in its recommendations published in July--the Government will extend the pilot schemes to the general election only if there is consensus among all parties in the House?
Mr. O'Brien:
We have said that we will act according to consensus wherever possible. We have made it clear that these are powers not for the Home Secretary, but for the House of Commons: they are powers enabling the House of Commons to make a decision to vote on an issue by affirmative resolution. The hon. Gentleman's claims that we are somehow trying to push things through have no legitimacy.
The hon. Gentleman's third argument was that we were trying to legislate to alter the period applying to overseas voters. By the time that the hon. Gentleman began his speech, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary had already said that we did not intend to try to do that in the Bill, but the hon. Gentleman had written his speech before the event and proceeded at length to tell us why we should not do something that we were not intending to do in any case.
Mr. Miller:
I think that I have discovered why the Conservative party has become so interested in this
Mr. O'Brien:
We wait to see more of the wonders that we have beheld in recent days in the Conservative party.
The next claim made by the hon. Member for Ryedale was that there had been no consultation. I will not go into all the consultation that there has been, such as the consultation over two years with local authorities and electoral registration officers through the working party, and in which the Conservatives were fully involved. I will not go into the details of the interim report and the public response to it, or the details of the 1999 report and the public response to that. I will not go into the fact that all the commercial companies that deal with the registers participated in a consultation document, or the fact that the Home Affairs Select Committee took public evidence in which the Conservative party was involved. All that happened, yet the hon. Gentleman claimed that there was no consultation. I bet he wishes that there was that amount of consultation on every Bill.
The hon. Gentleman commented on how awful it was that the Government did not appear to be considering taking the Committee stage on the Floor of the House. If his hon. Friends had told him, he would have known that it was agreed before the Bill came before us that the Committee stage would be taken on the Floor. I do not want to be paranoid--perhaps his hon. Friends did not tell him. He may have to take that up with them, in today's Conservative party.
I can tell the hon. Gentleman that, far from being a wolf in sheep's clothing, the Bill is what it appears to be. If he wants to call it a sheep, it is a sheep in sheep's clothing. It is a straightforward Bill, involving no mendacity. I hope that we can now proceed as we should, by way of debate and agreement.
I want to deal with one important issue that has arisen throughout the debate--the sale of the register. The hon. Members for Ryedale and for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes), my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound) and others all raised that issue. They are concerned about social exclusion as a result of the sale of an edited register.
It is important to point out that the register will still be available to commercial companies, but that it will be edited to allow people the choice not to be on the register. Electoral returning officers have made it clear that they get more complaints about names being sold to commercial companies than anything else.
The working party decided that it was a matter of principle that people should not be under a statutory duty to provide personal information about their names and whereabouts when they had no say in whether that information should be sold or used for purposes that were different from those that they had agreed. It said that they would have no choice in that and that that was wrong.
We have already heard of examples of abused spouses or those who do not want junk mail. People are concerned that a CD-ROM containing all the election registers in the country can be offered free on the front of a computer
magazine. If you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, want to find out where anyone lives, it is possible, with some of the new computers, quickly to identify that person's address. Such information can be offered free on the front of a magazine without the consent of those who have given that information under a statutory duty. A fundamental principle is involved--people should not be forced into that situation.
As I have said, social exclusion is a serious issue. The argument that people who are poor may be denied credit because they have opted out of the commercially available register needs to be dealt with. The Bill will make it easier for those who change address frequently to register at a new address. Therefore, in some ways, if they are potentially socially excluded they will have a better chance under the Bill of getting on a register and gaining access to credit. That would be an improvement.
Everyone should be given the right to make a choice, but the important thing is that it should be an informed choice. If they choose to tick the box--it will be their choice; they will have to make the decision--to exclude themselves from the edited register that is sold on, they should do it in an informed way.
We are discussing with the industry funding for a leaflet that would be agreed with us. We should remember that none of it will happen before an affirmative resolution is brought before the House, so there is plenty of opportunity to continue the discussions. The industry has suggested that it may be willing to provide that funding. The leaflet could go out with all electoral application forms, so that people would know what they were doing when they decided to tick that box. They would know that it might affect their credit rating and they would be informed of a number of other issues of which they need to be aware.
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