Electoral Registers

Gary Streeter Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Written Statements

[Mr Gary Streeter]

(Representing the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission): The Electoral Commission has today published a report on its analysis of the December 2015 electoral registers in Great Britain and its assessment of the individual electoral registration (IER) activities carried out by electoral registration officers (EROs) during the annual canvass.

EROs were required by law to publish their revised register by 1 December 2015 except in cases where there was a by-election in their area during the period of the canvass (1 July to 1 December 2015), in which case the publication of the register could have been postponed until up to 1 February 2016.

The size of the parliamentary electorate in Great Britain on 1 December 2015 was 43,478,635. This represents a decrease of approximately 1% since December 2014/March 2015, and of 3% since February/March 2014, when the last revised registers compiled under the old system were published.

It is important to note that the 1 December publication date represents a snapshot of the registers at that time, and that 1.3 million applications to register have been made since this date following significant registration activity across the UK in advance of the elections in May 2016. The Electoral Commission will also run a national public awareness campaign, supported by a range of partners.

In June 2015, the Commission reported that 1.9 million entries on the May 2015 electoral registers had been retained from the previous household registers. Following a significant amount of work by EROs and their staff since then, including a comprehensive household canvass, the number removed from the registers at the end of the transition period was reduced to approximately 770,000, though the Commission notes that this does not include data from the London borough of Hackney as they were unable to provide an accurate figure. This represented 1.7% of the electorate overall, although this varies considerably by local authority. The Commission’s report analyses this in more detail.

It is not possible to estimate the total number of eligible electors, still resident at the same address, who were removed from the registers. However, it is likely that some of the entries that were removed related to electors who were eligible to remain registered to vote. Although there was no legal requirement for EROs to write to those removed from the revised register, the Commission’s guidance to EROs has previously recommended that EROs do so, given the important elections taking place across Great Britain in May 2016. The Commission notes that a small number of EROs may have left unconfirmed electors on their registers when published on 1 December and that these are being looked into further by the Commission and the Cabinet Office.

The Commission reports that there remains an issue with the number of registered attainers in particular. There were 276,185 attainers on the December 2015 parliamentary registers, which represents a fall of 40% in the number of registered attainers since February/March 2014. This decline would indicate that the requirement for attainers to register individually under IER, rather than be registered by a parent or guardian, is having a negative impact on the number registered.

The Commission sets out a number of options for reversing this decline in the report.

The Commission’s view is that considerable challenges remain that will continue to have a significant impact on the accuracy and completeness of electoral registers in the future. The report published today outlines the most significant of these and highlights the opportunities the Commission thinks can be taken to ensure they are appropriately addressed in the future. These include measures to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of EROs’ activities and to modernise the registration process in support of the vision recently set out by the Government.

The Commission notes that it has encountered several issues in obtaining accurate register data and key headline statistics from Cabinet Office and electoral management software (EMS) suppliers.

The Commission specifically identified errors in the headline electorate figures for 1 December 2015 that were reported to Cabinet Office by customers of two of the software suppliers. As a result, when quoting national electorate figures, the Commission has used the electorate statistics collected by the national statistical agencies as part of their official electoral statistics collection.

For the other data presented in this report the Commission has used the data supplied to Cabinet Office and confirmed the figures with the relevant EROs. The Commission is confident that the national-level aggregated data provide an accurate picture of the overall state of the December 2015 registers in Great Britain.

However, given the late receipt of much of the data requested, the remaining problems with some data and concerns raised by some EROs, there are significant limitations on the analysis of specific data and at a local authority level in general.

The transition to IER is now complete, but being able to collect accurate and useful registration data from EROs will be an ongoing requirement for the Commission, and it is also important for each individual ERO to be able to call on this data to assess their own activities. The Commission intends to continue working closely with Cabinet Office and the EMS suppliers in the future in order to help improve the data produced by their systems.

Overall, the transition to IER in Great Britain has been managed well by EROs. Assessments against performance standard 2, which requires that EROs deliver their strategies and use available data to monitor progress and make amendments to their plans where necessary to ensure they remain appropriate, have been impacted by the late receipt of data and, therefore, the process has not yet concluded. However, the Commission has reached an assessment that one ERO, for the London borough of Hackney, did not meet performance standard 2. The final set of performance assessments will be made available in the summer.

At the same time, the Commission will release its final report on the transition to IER when it publishes a full accuracy and completeness of the December 2015 registers. The findings from the study will be assessed against comparable data on the last revised registers compiled under household registration in February/March 2014, when the Commission estimated the Great Britain registers to be 87% accurate and 85% complete.

Copies of the Commission’s report have been placed in the Library and it is also available on the Commission’s website: www.electoralcommission.org.uk.

[HCWS547]