Written evidence to be reported to the House
Political Parties and Elections Bill
12:00 pm
Peter Wardle: I do not think there are any fundamental practical or technical obstacles. The biggest problem is the one I referred to before, about which the Government are understandably and legitimately concerned, which is that eligible people might, for various reasons, fail to appear on the new register. There are many ways of addressing that and we have made it clear what those are. First, sufficient resources need to be put into a public information effort. Probably some things might need to be done that were not done when individual registration was introduced in Northern Ireland—principally, combining the introduction so that, on implementation, there is some sort of safeguard so that there is not a cliff edge for people in the first year of individual registration to fall off and then that is it; instead, they should be identified as potentially falling off and followed up, because we need their personal identifiers before we move forward.
The second thing is to look seriously at data sharing, so that, for example, if one part of a local authority knows that a family has moved in or out of the authority area, the electoral registration officer should somehow get a trigger to take action on his or her own account to ensure that the register is up to date.
This is a not insignificant change; the commission has never made any secret of that. This is a major change that effectively requires all registered electors to re-register and provide their personal identifiers afresh. That will make the register more secure and will give them an individual stake, in every case, in their electoral registration. There are certain categories of the community who are going to be harder to reach. We need to make sure that enough effort is put into finding them. There need to be safeguards so that people do not fall off overnight. This is not something that can happen immediately.
To answer the second part of your question, we think that if there were movement in the legislation now, the earliest that you could attempt to build a new register on the basis of individual registration would be in the 2010 renewal canvas. Almost certainly you would not have a comprehensive set of personal identifiers from that exercise, and until you have a comprehensive set of personal identifiers you cannot start to use those personal identifiers to guarantee, for example, the security of the voting process in the way that we would like to see. So we are probably looking at a two to three year gradual process until the register is complete and has a much greater degree of integrity, in that there are personal identifiers for each person registered. This is not an overnight fix. I think we are realistic about the time it will take. We acknowledge the concerns that the Government and others have put forward. But our view remains that it is better to get started on it now than to delay things.