Voter Registration: Students

Lord Storey Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Storey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the initiative in Northern Ireland, what plans they have to allow pupils to register to vote in schools, sixth form and further education colleges.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Government have no plans to legislate to require electoral registration officers or schools and colleges to provide for pupils to register to vote at school. EROs are free to arrange registration sessions in their local education establishments, and many already do. The Government have recently provided additional funding to encourage activities which promote the registration of young people among other target groups.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I note what my noble friend says, but, given the success of the initiative in Northern Ireland, is there not a case for having an independent evaluation to see whether it is worth using that scheme in the rest of the UK? The fact that 189,000 17 year-olds in college will turn 18 before the deadline shows even more clearly how we need to get the message across.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have, of course, evaluated the Northern Ireland experience. We were dealing with paper transactions then and we are now moving to online transactions. Since the beginning of February, there have been nearly 500,000 online registrations, so we are very much achieving what we want, and we look forward to seeing more coming. The Northern Ireland experience was useful at the time. However, it was not a great success in maintaining registration: that there was a very substantial drop-off after the first year of registration for 17 year-olds to the level of registration of 18 to 19 year-olds.