Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, pursuant to the Answer of 19 October 2017 to Question 10794 on the electoral register, what estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of establishing an online service to enable people to check if they are registered to vote; and if he will publish any cost-benefit analysis his Department has undertaken on that policy.

Based on the findings from recent exploratory work, we estimate that the creation of such a service would cost between £10m and £40m, and then between £7m and £20m per year to keep running. The current average annual cost of processing duplicate applications is estimated to be between £400,000 and £1.2m. There are also no obvious solutions to technical barriers to implementing such a tool. In particular, it is not technically possible, currently, to have real time identity verification without a setup delay. Both factors point towards needing to find an alternative solution to duplicate applications to register to vote, most likely implemented at a local level. We will continue to work with the electoral community in addressing this issue.