Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, pursuant to the Answer of 6 December 2017 to Question 116339 , if he will publish the exploratory work his Department has undertaken on the creation of an online service to enable people to check if they are registered to vote.

The Government does not intend to publish its high-level assessment of an online registration status checking survey. The results of the assessment were that such service is both impracticable given significant technical and security considerations and very expensive. Indeed, as set out previously, the cost of such a service would far exceed the cost of processing duplicate applications.

Our work on registration is focused on meeting the requirements of citizens. The need for citizens to be able to check their registration status has not been clearly identified. There is, however, a clear need for citizens to be confident they can apply to register to vote quickly and easily. This is met by the existing online service, which has now seen more than 30m applications. Citizens with questions about their registration status can contact their local elections office directly. Our online service provides citizens with the relevant contact information

We recognise that making applying to register quicker and easier than ever before can generate unnecessary duplicate applications, especially around elections. We therefore intend to continue to work with partners across the electoral community to find ways of reducing unnecessary duplicate applications and making the processing of such applications as easy as possible.