Individual Voter Registration

No, it is not. If the hon. Gentleman will listen, we have introduced proposals having learned from the experience of Northern Ireland, for example in the carry-forward, to make sure that we minimise the risk of any drop in the registered electorate before the 2015 election. Between that election and the drawing up of registers for the next boundary review, there will be another full household canvass. There are therefore good safeguards in the system to make sure that the general election and the 2015 boundary review are held on the most accurate and complete registers possible. I shall say a little more about that later. I do not think that it is correct to say that the Government have eroded the civic duty of registering to vote. It is not an offence—this comes back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) made—not to be registered to vote. It is an offence to refuse to provide information to an electoral registration officer on the household canvass form when required to do so. We do not propose to change that, but I must note that there is some doubt about how effective that is, given that about 15% of electors are not registered to vote. I shall say a little more about that later. I accept that the way in which we phrased our original proposals, with regard to the opt-out and some of the language that we used—I said this when I gave evidence to the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform—could have led people to think that we wanted to weaken the extent to which we felt citizens had an obligation to register to vote. The Deputy Prime Minister and I have both said that we are minded to change that provision when we introduce our Bill. To be fair, the right hon. Member for Tooting acknowledged that.