The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)
I am announcing today that the Government have placed the implementation plan for individual electoral registration (IER) in the House Library. The plan has also been published on the Cabinet Office website.
The aim of this plan is to explain how the new system will affect citizens and electoral administrators and how this change will be delivered. In particular, it outlines the timetable for the work and how this will be managed alongside other activities electoral administrators will have to carry out over that period. This plan has been developed in consultation with key delivery partners, the Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA), the Electoral Commission (EC) and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE).
We have been working with stakeholders throughout the process of developing our proposals for IER, and have already consulted on the overall policy and the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill, adapting our policy to reflect feedback from Parliament (notably the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which carried out pre-legislative scrutiny on our proposals), the public, and other stakeholders. We piloted data matching last year with 22 local authorities. We will continue the approach of working with stakeholders throughout the delivery of this change, to ensure that we have assurance that the new service will work effectively on the ground before we go live in 2014.