Oral Answers to Questions

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Actually, I think that one of the problems in policing, as is widely recognised, has been that there are not enough police officers out on the front line, on the beat, in our communities. By some estimates, only 11% of police officers are out and about in our communities at any one time. Yes, we are having to deal with financial pressures because of the reasons that I explained earlier, but at the same time we must reform policing to minimise the amount of time that police officers allocate to work in the back office, and to ensure that they are free to be out on the streets, which is where we want them, for as much time as possible.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

T7. In a sample of more than 80 immigration cases coming through my constituency, more than 15% of those involved were found to be on the electoral roll when they had no entitlement to be there. Does the Deputy Prime Minister not agree that urgent, immediate steps are needed to introduce positive voter identification?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I strongly agree that we must introduce measures to tackle electoral fraud. As my hon. Friend may know, we have announced that we will legislate to speed up the introduction of individual electoral registration to before the next general election, in 2014. Under that new scheme each person will have to register individually, whereas the current system is registration by household, and they will be asked to provide personal identifiers, including their national insurance number, to enable registration officers to verify the identity of a person before they are added to the register. That should tackle fraudulent or inaccurate register entries, which my hon. Friend rightly highlights.