Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what targets his Department has set for the electoral registration of young people; and whether his Department has plans to assess the potential merits of any auto-enrolment schemes for that purpose.

Individual Electoral Registration (IER) and online registration were introduced in Great Britain last year, replacing the outdated system of household registration. Online registration has proved popular: over three quarters of the 9.6 million applications to register to vote made since June 2014 have been submitted online. Since June 2014, over 2.2 million applications have been received from 16-24 year olds.

The Government strongly supports the principle underlying IER, that people must make an individual application to register to vote, and is currently examining the results of prompted enrolment schemes such as the one recently undertaken at Sheffield University, to see if they have wider application.