Electoral Registration

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

I shall come to the data-matching shortly, but we have considered those on the register in December 2013 and those on the register in December 2014, after the data-matching. An estimated 1 million voters have dropped off the electoral register. For 1 million to be missing in a year is bad enough, but the trends in the groups that are unregistered is also worrying. Data coming in from local authorities are showing serious drops among students and those turning 18. In the patch of my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), the number registering fell from 630 to 114 in just 12 months. As has been said, the figure for attainers registering in Liverpool has slumped from 2,300 to just 76. Three areas with large number of students —Cardiff, Newcastle and Brighton—have seen drops of between 9% and 10.5% in the numbers registered.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I represent one of the youngest constituencies in the country, with an increasing number of young private renters—there are more private renters than home owners in the constituency—and people who move frequently drop off the register. I pay tribute to my borough of Hackney, which has put money and time into bringing the register up again. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the cost of doing so is also a problem for local tax payers?

[Sadiq Khan]

To give Members an idea of the scale of the challenge, local authorities now have to write to each individual voter rather than to each household, which is a huge expense. To be fair—because I like to be fair—the Deputy Prime Minister has finally woken up—

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I shall start by making the bold statement that if the Conservative proposals on electoral registration had gone ahead in their original form in 2010 and 2011, we would have seen a constitutional coup that would have kept the Tory party in power in this country for a generation. There would have been a two-pronged attack that involved bringing the date for the introduction of individual electoral registration forward by a year. That simple act would have resulted in a total of 35% of the electorate dropping off the register, in addition to the 15% who were already missing from it. Those people would have been the most economically and socially marginalised in the country, and their marginalisation would have been complete with their vote gone.

The second prong of the attack was to have been the equalisation of constituencies at 75,000 electors per seat, plus or minus 5%. That change would have been carried out while 7.5 million people were missing from the electoral register—the equivalent of 100 missing parliamentary seats.

[Meg Hillier]

I am concerned that the number of people on the electoral register is used as a proxy for local government funding allocations. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a real concern, especially for the poorer constituencies, which are experiencing the greatest drop-off of all?

[Chris Ruane]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

I wish to probe more deeply into the machinations of that grand plan. It is only by looking at what has happened in the recent past that we can find out what would happen over the next few months if the Tories were to get back in.