Question

To ask the hon. Member for South West Devon, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, pursuant to the Answer of 1 July 2014, Official Report, column 613W, on electoral register, what assessment the Electoral Commission has made of the accuracy of two separate pilot schemes which data mined Student Loans Company data.

The Commission has published an evaluation report on each of the two data-matching pilots conducted using data from the Student Loans Company.

http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/our-work/our-research/electoral-registration-research

In 2012, the Commission found that there were very few registrations from data matching with the Student Loans Company (SLC) database. This, and responses to the follow-up activity, support the view expressed by the SLC that the data used for these pilots (at the end of the academic year) was sometimes out of date.

In 2013, the Commission concluded that there were some issues with the addresses on this data being incomplete. Only one pilot area reported usable results for this database and this pilot area reported a low number of new registrations.