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Electoral Administration Bill

I do not believe that that is an issue, because we are not into that territory, yet. Last week, the Constitutional Affairs Committee held an evidence session with the Electoral Commission. Conservative Members have discussed either creating barriers to registration or encouraging participation, and the Electoral Commission is now inclined to discuss the situation in terms of a spectrum from creating barriers to registration to encouraging participation. It does not see one function as superseding the other; it sees the situation as a spectrum, and we should accept the existence of that spectrum. If we want to encourage participation and to get the maximum number of people registered—people cannot participate if they are not registered—we must focus on the barriers. Some of the ideas that we have discussed would create barriers to registration. When the Electoral Commission conducted its research, it asked people why they did not register. Those people said that registration is ““old-fashioned””, ““time-consuming”” and ““a chore””. In some parts of the country and among some age groups and ethnic minorities, there are already people who do not register, because they think it ““a time-consuming chore””. We must be cognisant of that point, because everything that we add to the process makes it more of a chore and more time consuming. I cannot agree to proposals such as adding national insurance numbers to registration. On electoral registration officers seeing it as their job to encourage registration and participation, it is key that the process is not understood: people assume that the council automatically registers people; they do not understand the process; they think that they are already registered; or they do not see the benefits. Encouraging registration is clearly an educational task and is in no shape or form a political activity.