Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I wish to take this opportunity this afternoon to inform Members of my proposals for taking forward reforms to the arrangements for local government elections, including who can vote, how they are registered, how people vote and who can stand for election. My statement today focuses on arrangements for local elections, but I'm aware, Presiding Officer, of the work that you have in hand on reforms to this Assembly and that very much the same arrangements will also apply in the future to Welsh parliamentary elections. Legislative proposals concerning local government elections in Wales will be included in a local government Bill, which I intend to introduce later this year. The proposals are in keeping with the consultation last autumn, the detailed results of which I will be publishing very shortly.

Local democracy is all about participation. We want to boost the numbers registered as electors, make it easier for people to cast their votes and give more people the right to take part. We have seen how in recent years the move to individual registration—which I believe was rushed and underprepared—has led to some groups of people dropping off the register. I intend to counteract that in part by enabling and encouraging electoral registration officers to automatically add people to the register where they are satisfied with the information to hand. That should work particularly well with school students where local authorities already have their details and simply need to transfer these to the ERO. Anyone automatically registered would be added to the edited register, not the one available to marketing organisations, and they would be contacted to confirm their preferences and whether they would be happy to go on the full register or, in the case of anyone whose identity should not be revealed, to become registered anonymously.

I also intend to create an all-Wales electronic register, combining the registers held in each county with a common format, making managing the registers more efficient and making easier the process of splitting registers at elections that cross county boundaries.

Voting at elections in this country has been conducted in more or less the same way since the nineteenth century. Most of us go to a polling station and put a cross on a piece of paper using a heavy leaded pencil on a piece of string. Many people like this in fact, because it is a bit of an event, a chance to speak to the neighbours, and, in general, people do trust it. However, Presiding Officer, we also know that it is increasingly at odds with people’s everyday lives, and this is especially true for young people. For this reason, I intend to legislate for pilots at local elections and by-elections that would explore the options of electronic voting and counting, and voting in different places and on different days. The Electoral Commission would need to evaluate any pilot before we moved to make anything permanent and widespread, but time is overdue for making the voting process more modern and more flexible, observing, of course, the need to keep any new system completely secure.