Part of Orders of the Day — Election Fraud (Northern Ireland) Bill – in the House of Commons at 8:30 pm on 31 October 2001.
On the suspicions directed at the Treasury, does the hon. Gentleman accept that however much of a mess the national insurance system might be, it is not a factor in the debate, because as long as someone could find his number, it could be entered and used in a database in Northern Ireland? The state of the national insurance system is probably not the explanation, but that makes the Minister's seeming intransigence on an eminently sensible idea even more confusing.