Electoral Administration Bill

I pay tribute to the Select Committee’s work under the right hon. Gentleman’s leadership. He raises an important issue in the Committee’s work and in the House today. People who have voted all their lives find it exasperating if they go down to the polling and are told that they cannot vote because they are not on the electoral register. They usually protest and say, ““How can the council think that I am not there? They sent me a council tax bill yesterday.”” We should ensure that we strike off people who have moved and so on—it is important that the register is as accurate as possible —but whether we can use data sharing to check who is or is not in an area is something that the Electoral Commission’s performance standards can address. Some electoral registration officers feel that they are not allowed to carry out data checking to tackle either any gap in the register or people whose names may have fallen off the register. To clarify that, we will state in secondary legislation that they have the right to check all the data that they have. We will also consider whether we need secondary legislation to give them access to other data beyond what is held by councils for the purpose of completing the electoral register. Under the Bill, we will require them to check the data that they hold to ensure that their register is as complete as possible.