To ask the honourable Member for South West Devon, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, how many voters the Electoral Commission hopes to register in each of the next five years.

The Electoral Commission does not itself register voters, however, it does conduct public awareness campaigns to encourage electors to register to vote ahead of each poll.

The Commission sets targets for the number of registration forms downloaded from its website, aboutmyvote.co.uk, during campaign periods. This measure provides a proxy for the number of registrations attributable to each campaign. The targets for the number of registration forms downloaded vary for each poll taking account of, for example, the size of the electorate.

The Commission is currently investigating whether it would be possible to measure and set targets for the number of actual registrations as a result of its campaigns. It is currently not possible to do this as the registers are managed by 363 Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) across Great Britain and data is not collected for the number of registration forms downloaded from aboutmyvote.co.uk or over the time period covered by Commission campaigns.

The Commission will work with EROs across Scotland to establish the most effective way of monitoring the number of registration forms received as a result of its public awareness campaign ahead of the referendum on independence for Scotland in September 2014. If successful, the same model could be applied to other future public awareness campaigns.