Oral Answers to Questions

Nick Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

The Deputy Prime Minister was asked—

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

1. What assessment he has made of the potential effect on levels of voter registration of not creating a legal offence of failure to return an individual electoral registration request.

[The Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Nick Clegg)]

Before turning to the question, I am sure that the whole House will wish to join me in echoing the tribute paid by you, Mr Speaker, to Alan Keen, the Member for Feltham and Heston, for his 19 years of service as a Member of this House.

We need to establish some facts about what is and what is not changing in electoral registration. At present, it is not an offence not to register to vote, and that will not change. It is an offence not to provide information when requested to give it, and that will not change either. The civic duty to register to vote, which everybody recognises, remains, and that will not change. There are suggestions, including from the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform, to create a new offence—one that does not currently exist—of failing to apply to register to vote. Of course the Government will listen to that, but I would warn against thinking that the only solution is criminalising people, because only 144 people were prosecuted in the last year under the present offences. There are a whole lot of other things that we need to get on with to ensure that we transfer people on to the individual electoral registration system over the coming years, which is exactly what we plan to do.

[Nick Smith]

A high level of voter registration is fundamental to our democracy. Credit companies are concerned that if the electoral register is reduced, it will be more difficult to carry out credit worthiness checks. Have the Government considered data sharing with the credit companies, which have excellent personal address information, to increase voter registration in our democracy?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I certainly agree with the principle that we should try to use data sets to compare the data that electoral registration officers hold with the data held by other people in easily accessible databases, and that is exactly what we are piloting at the moment. However, I do not think that I can do any better than to quote the Electoral Commission, which said:

“We would not want to see a move away from the current approach—where electoral registration, though not compulsory, is regarded as an important civic duty”.

That is precisely what we are doing.