Electoral Administration Bill

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. Electoral registration officers should be imaginative in how they go about encouraging registration. Let us increase the canvass as well, although that will not do anything like 100 per cent. of the job. We have to deal with trying to get data and information from other sources, and that is in the Bill. When the data protection people gave evidence to the Select Committee hearings, they were not worried about cross-matching data provided that it was clear from the initial collection what purpose it would be used for—that is the issue. There is a genuine concern not only that electoral registration officers are not currently cross-matching data to which they have access within the local authority, but that they may need to access data outside the authority. In some cases, local authorities wanting to obtain data on young people becoming 18 can go to their own schools. In my constituency, most young people becoming 18 are based in the college, which is outside the local authority, rather than a school within it. How can we stop the problem of bias in the system, which means that data can be captured in some authorities but not in others? Stock transfers of houses are another problem. Local authorities can access data on their own council tenants before such a transfer, but I am not sure whether they can afterwards. I do not know, but the question has to be answered. Housing associations are sometimes set up to take over stock transfer properties and they take over documentation and data about tenants with them. Those are the sort of problems that have to be dealt with. How can we ensure that access to data and cross-matching goes wider than the local authority, into the rest of the public sector and probably outside it into organisations such as the utilities and the Post Office? I now come to the crucial point. I believe that the Bill is a halfway house in a number of senses. Eventually, we want to get to individual registration, but we want to do so with a much fuller registration system in which we can be certain of getting into the higher 90s per cent. of registration figures, just like the Australians who reach 98 per cent. They do not rely on canvassing as the primary means of drawing up the register; rather, they rely on data from a range of sources. They rely on the utilities, postal services, local authorities and other bodies to give information to electoral registration officers—in Australia, there is an electoral commission for each state. All the information from those bodies is used to establish when people have moved in or out of properties, when people have become 18 or died and so forth. They check whether the information is correct and draw up the data on that basis. The Australians ask why, in this country, we bother with annual registration when we get forms back, by and large, from people who have lived in a property for 20 years, rather than capturing data from people who change their property regularly, sometimes annually, particularly in the private rented sector. The Australians concentrate on households where the information has changed from one year to the next. They follow that up closely and ensure that it benefits the registration process. Better use is made of registration officers’ time because their efforts are spread throughout the year rather than for three or four months with little concentration of effort for the rest of the year. We have a lopsided system that, to use the currently in-vogue jargon, is not fit for purpose. The Bill is a great step forward in giving more powers and responsibilities to electoral registration officers, but it takes us only part of the way there. I would like us to think about consulting on a new Bill, perhaps in three or four years’ time, which deals with how best to move towards the Australian system, while tightening up the security of the voting system by taking individual registration into account.