Rupa Huq
Main Page: Rupa Huq (Labour - Ealing Central and Acton)Department Debates - View all Rupa Huq's debates with the Cabinet Office
(8 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
John Penrose
This is an important issue. We have made up to £3 million available to local authorities to pursue the remaining four in every 100. By the end of this year, all those people will have been contacted up to nine times, either by phone, email or letter, or by someone knocking on their door, in order to confirm that they are genuine voters with a pulse, in which case they will have been confirmed on the register. We want to ensure that we do not inadvertently disfranchise them. Anyone who is left over will almost certainly be a ghost voter—a ghost in the machine; a data error—and can therefore be safely removed.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
13. Would the Minister acknowledge that a disproportionately high number of those falling off the electoral roll are young people such as the students attending the Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College and the University of West London in my constituency? Can he not see that this is the biggest electoral disfranchisement in our history?
John Penrose
No, I would not acknowledge that, because if they are genuine people on the register, we will find them and confirm them as genuine. No genuine voters will be disfranchised by this move. The hon. Lady is absolutely right, however, to say that there are significant groups of under-represented people who are not on the register at all and therefore cannot be disfranchised by being removed from it. This is a fundamental issue for the health of our democracy, and we must go out and find those people. We need to have proper registration drives to get them on to the register in the first place.