Individual Voter Registration

We are retaining the offence of not responding to the household form. The logic is that if someone does not respond, they affect not just themselves but perhaps other people's right to vote. That is why we have kept that proposal. We then faced the question, in the returning of the invitation to register, of whether we really wanted to create a criminal offence and criminalise people for not registering to vote. First, I start from the position of thinking that that would not be effective. The evidence at best, if I am being generous, is very mixed about whether that is effective. Secondly, we do not want to clog up the court system with a huge number of these cases. In Northern Ireland, where someone correctly said the offence of not returning the individual form exists, the provision has in effect become meaningless because when it was used in court and someone was prosecuted, the court gave them a slap on the wrist with a fine of 1p. The provision has effectively become unusable.