Question

To ask the hon. Member for South West Devon, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, what assessment the Electoral Commission has made of its performance in ensuring the accuracy of the electoral register during the 2015 General Election.

The Electoral Commission does not maintain the electoral registers, which is the statutory duty of Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and their teams. The Electoral Commission issues guidance to EROs about how to deliver both well run elections and public awareness campaigns to make sure voters are aware of when and how to register to vote. The Commission also runs its own public awareness campaigns to remind people to register to vote and to support the activity of EROs. During its campaign before the 2015 General Election there were 1,561,093 additions to the electoral registers, as detailed in its campaign evaluation report.

In June 2015 the Electoral Commission published its assessment of the progress with transition to Individual Electoral Registration (IER). An updated version of this assessment was recently laid in the House Library amending a small number of typographical errors found in background figures, none of which affected the findings of the assessment or the Commission’s advice.

The Commission’s June IER assessment did not include an estimate of levels of accuracy and completeness of the registers. The Commission’s last report on this was published in 2014. The June report did note, however, that activities such as the introduction of IER and the introduction of online registration are likely to have had a positive impact on accuracy and completeness. However, it was also clear that others will have had a negative effect, such as the lack of comprehensive household canvassing activity in 2014.

The Electoral Commission has made clear that it does not support the Government’s decision to bring forward the end of the transition to IER to 1 December 2015 and has noted instead that this should remain as 1 December 2016, as Parliament originally decided. However, should Parliament approve the Government’s order to bring forward the end of the transition, the Commission will continue to monitor the state of the registers and will collect further data from EROs focusing on the 2015 canvass and the December 2015 register.