Electoral Administration Bill

Clearly, the university must provide information about who is resident in those halls. That is simple to do—some universities do it and some do not. That is why I am in favour of having a legislative requirement for certain bodies to provide the electoral registration officer with information or for the officer to be able to gain access to that information. We would then have national standards—we will come to them later—that require registration officers to behave in a certain way when they receive information that people’s circumstances have changed or so that they know what do to if a form is not sent back. Different registration officers deal with those situations differently. Some officers keep people on the register and some do not. Some officers take them off after one year, and others after two years if they do not have corresponding evidence from council tax documents that those people still live at the address. We must deal with those approaches by laying down national standards. However, we are talking about the forms and whether we need one form for the whole house or a form for each individual. The reality is that we have a mix at present. We will eventually move to individual registration as we put in place all the other arrangements, but in the meantime, while we are conducting the canvass, I hope that we use both sets of forms to try to ensure that when we knock on the door and find someone in, we get the maximum amount of information for registration purposes that we can.