Question

To ask the hon. Member for South West Devon, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, what progress the Electoral Commission has made in differentiating in online registration between people who are already registered and people newly on register.

In its report published on 24 February 2015, the Electoral Commission stated that 80% of the approximately 2 million registration applications made since December 2014 were made online. However, some of these may have been duplicates.

The Electoral Commission and the Cabinet Office sought to collect data on duplications across all applications up to December but the dataset was not reliable enough to report on it.

The Commission and the Cabinet Office intend to collect improved data on duplications in May.