Question

To ask the hon. Member for South West Devon, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, how many and what proportion of electors in each UK parliamentary constituency were (a) confirmed and (b) unconfirmed on 1 December 2014.

The Electoral Commission will be publishing data on the 1 December 2014 registers in England and Wales in February 2015. Data on Scotland will be published in April 2015 after the publication of the registers there in late February and early March.

There is a delay between the date of publication and the availability of a national summary because the data needs to be collected from 348 electoral registration officers (EROs), collated and analysed in order to provide a robust and reliable assessment of the state of the electoral registers in England and Wales. Not all EROs will publish a register on 1 December as legislation allows them to delay publication in the event of a by-election.

The data, when available, will be presented by local authority and not by parliamentary constituency.

The timing of the Commission’s report was highlighted in the written statement it tabled on 21 October, which also announced the publication of data on the results of the confirmation process, undertaken in summer 2014 as part of the move to Individual Electoral Registration. This data was made available by the Commission by parliamentary constituency and local authority and is available on its website.