Question

To ask the Deputy Prime Minister, pursuant to the Answer of 3 February 2015 to Question 222323, under what headings the funding for Electoral Registration Officers to support the transition to Individual Electoral Registration will be spent.

Cabinet Office has provided over £30m of funding to all Electoral Reform Officers (EROs) to support the transition to Individual Electoral Registration (IER). This funding has been paid via grants under Section 31 of the Local Government Act (2003) in England and Wales and via invoices in Scotland and was given to EROs to meet their statutory obligations around the introduction of IER. They are non-ring-fenced to allow EROs to make their own decisions about how best to allocate funding to successfully deliver IER. We also sought and received signed declarations from Section 151 officers in England and Wales and EROs in Scotland to ensure that there would be no reduction in current levels of funding and that the allocations were intended to be supplementary funding to cover the net additional cost of IER only.