Parliament and the missing voters

London – a  world city with a growing population of 8.5 million and expected to reach 10 million within the next decade. Strange then that the same city is expected to lose a dozen MPs from its present contingent of 73 in the forthcoming Parliamentary Boundary Review.

And it’s not only London, all of the urban conurbations in the UK, despite growing populations, are on course to lose a substantial number of their MPs.

Welcome to the crazy world of individual voter registration (and one which has been well covered by LabourList over the years.) and a calculating Tory Government.

Previously voter registration was the responsibility of a self nominated Head of Household.  Now the responsibility rests with the individual voter. IER was introduced to improve the level of voter registration understandable as the Electoral Commission estimate that at least seven million eligible voters are missing from the electoral registers.  In fact the number of voters on the electoral register actually declined in its first year of operation -by 800,000 between December 2013 and December 2014 (source ONS)

A multi-million pound publicity campaign, high profile general election campaign and a public commitment to keep all those currently on the electoral register regardless of whether they responded to official requests for additional information during the rushed introduction of individual voting in many areas ( ‘carried over’ voters) helped increased the total number of voters by May 2015.

All in a spirit of civic engagement – and then the Tories won the General Election.

The Electoral Commission had recommended that the ‘carried over voters – some 1.9 million voters remain on the electoral register until December 2016. A recognition that the process of IER needed more time to bed itself in and allow more voters to complete the process of registration individually Instead (during the leadership contests for both Labour and Liberal Democrats) the new Tory Government ignored official advice and moved the cut off point to December 2015.

And those lovers of conspiracy theory have got it right on this one. These millions of voters will be removed from the 2015 electoral register that will be the basis for the forthcoming parliamentary boundary review!.  Needless to say such voters are disproportionately concentrated in urban areas (55,000 in Manchester, 13,000 in Lewisham to name but two).

The Tories are also pushing through with the reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600 (at the same time as creating dozens more of unelected Peers).

Blatant manipulation and against official advice but the real problem is that the introduction of individual voting was never thought through properly.  We have placed the onus on cash strapped local councils to introduce one of the most fundamental changes to our voting system.

Moreover despite all the publicity we actually haven’t abolished the household canvass at all!  So this autumn every household will be sent a form for that much derided ‘Head of Household’ to complete. Each of the names listed will be contacted will then to have their details verified and then individually contacted by post to confirm if they are eligible to be on the register. So struggling local councils will see their administrative work more than doubled through this entirely paper based process. Electoral Registration Officers will now have to maintain direct contact with more than 48 million individual voters rather than twenty million households. The only organisations to benefit from this bold leap forward are the Post Office and suppliers of official stationary.

Equally for years Universities has been able to register their eligible students as an ‘institutional landlord’. This option was removed under IER. The consequence for a large number of universities was that registration went from 100% of those eligible to less than 10%. In many towns where students represent a large part of the population this has had a disproportionate impact on the overall levels of registration.

The tragedy is that we have missed the opportunity to transform the whole process of voter registration by moving from a household canvass process to one that tracks all voters as soon as they become eligible to vote. The model here is Australia ( and one I know well from the Australian election campaign in 2014) where the individual states and federal government combine to produce one of the world’s most efficient systems of voter registration at a fraction of the cost of the hybrid system we are now introducing in the UK.

Australian states invest a lot of resources in identifying those eligible to vote, including a well organised programme with schools and  colleges.  Once  on the register you stay on it.  They achieve this with an impressive IT system that cross-references all the relevant data bases such as driving licences, housing lists and university registers. The State of Victoria with a population of 3.5 million has a register which is 95% accurate and employs a staff of five. They final cross-reference is with the State Register to ensure all those who have died are removed from the voters list!

Even in the US many individual states are moving to automatic registration.

So in that great British tradition we have ended up with the worst of all worlds. For those who claim that it is so simple to fill in a registration form you have to ask why we have made the process so complex and one that has to be repeated every time an individual changes address. Compared to the Australian system we have placed the onus on the individual to cope with a complex bureaucracy which assumes that every time a person moves that this is an entirely fresh claim and proof of eligibility is needed. It’s as if every time we changed jobs we had to apply for a work permit!

It is increasingly evident that the introduction of individual voting has impacted differently of different groups of voters. Recent estimates suggest that if you are a pensioner living in the shires in your own house there is a 90% chance that you will be on the electoral register. If you are young, living in private rented accommodation in a major city it is under 10%

Needless to say there are a host of unintended consequences to the way that we have introduced IER in the UK:

• As we draw our potential jurors from the Electoral Register the disappearance of large numbers of 18—30 year olds means that in future juries will be increasingly unrepresentative of the local population with all the implications for our legal system.

• If the forthcoming EU referendum is held in university term time then the millions of students currently not registered at their term time address may well miss out on exercising a preference.

• The Parliamentary and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee, the one Select Committee, that took a genuine interest in voter registration and its impact on democracy, was quietly abolished after the General Election.

Put all this together and we face a Boundary Review being conducted on the worst ever electoral register. If we proceed as planned we will see a huge transfer of parliamentary representation from the towns to the shires when the population trends are the exact opposite.

So what can be done?

There is little time left but here are three suggestions;

• the PLP can and should mount a challenge to the Government’s decision to ignore the advice of the Electoral Commission. There is an opportunity to build a successful parliamentary coalition against this ‘legal gerrymandering’.

• Pressurise the government to repeat the multi-million publicity campaign to encourage voters to register before December 2015 (including bringing ‘Bite the Ballot’ forward from its normal February campaign

• Work with University Authorities and the NUS to encourage students to register at their term time addresses (hopefully the thousands of new members can assist with this and the wider campaign)

Longer term we should be pressing for a Speakers Conference on the impact of the flawed introduction of IER on our Parliamentary democracy.

America may not have much to teach us about politics but one thing they do get right. They base their entitlement to elected representatives on population statistics reflecting eligible voters not the registered electorate.

The clumsy introduction of Individual Voter Registration in the UK, which has broken the link between the eligible and the registered electorate, means that if we care about Parliamentary democracy we are going to have to do the same here.

Paul Wheeler writes on local politics.