Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, how much his Department has spent in (a) 2017 and (b) 2018 on promoting (i) greater democratic engagement and (ii) voter ID.

The Cabinet Office has taken a number of steps to promote democratic engagement. This includes National Democracy Week (held in July 2018) and three projects funded by the Suffrage Fund Centenary Programme. These projects are the Democracy Ambassadors Scheme to recruit and train youth democracy ambassadors, the development and publication of toolkit for parliamentarians and a new secondary schools resource (to be release later this year). Spending on these projects has been spread across 2017 and 2018 calendar years and amounts to less than £500k to date.

The Electorial and local authorities are also responsible for democratic engagement.

The Government is also committed to making sure that our electoral system is fit for the future. Vulnerabilities cannot be allowed to undermine the integrity of our democracy. As part of the Government’s manifesto commitment to ensure that a form of identification must be presented before voting, five voter ID pilots took place at the local elections on 3 May 2018.

The accounting process is being completed for the cost of each local authority pilot's local promotion of voter ID. The results from the pilots show that the local awareness campaigns in all of the five pilot areas to prepare the public were effective in engaging voters.