Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

It is quite gutsy of the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) to raise this when prominent members of her own party such as Ken Livingstone seem to have very exotic tax arrangements, and when the Labour party now relies for 90% of its funding on trade unions that then write the parliamentary questions that Labour Members read out in this Chamber.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

7. What recent representations he has received on individual electoral registration.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)]

We have received a number of representations on our proposals for individual electoral registration, including an excellent report from the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform, to which we have responded.

[Mr Betts]

I am sure that the Minister agrees that if we are to avoid the prospect of many people leaving the electoral register when IER is introduced, we need a significant and robust system of data swapping. If that cannot be achieved in time for the date when the Government plan to introduce IER, will the Minister delay that date or run the risk of millions of people falling off the electoral register?

[Mr Harper]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has studied our response to the Select Committee’s report, so he will know that one of the things that arose from our data-matching pilots was that there is a good opportunity to use a pre-verification process to ensure that we, in effect, put a floor under electoral registers to reduce the risk of people falling off the register. We will test that further and no doubt debate it when the proposed legislation is going through the House. That can give us a great deal of confidence that we will not see the problems the hon. Gentleman mentions.