Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of setting up an online service for voters to check whether they are already registered to vote for the purposes of reducing the number of duplicate applications.

I refer you to my answer to the member for Lancaster and Fleetwood. Determining an individual’s registration status is the responsibility of Electoral Registration Officers and only EROs hold up-to-date information allowing a citizen to check if they are registered. This means that citizens can contact their local electoral administration office to make enquiries about registration status.

Making information about registration status available on-line on a national basis would be a significant undertaking and we have no current plans to introduce such a system. It may be more appropriate for EROs to work with their software suppliers to make registers available for checking on-line.