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Electoral Administration Bill

The hon. Lady makes a good point. All hon. Members share the experience of our constituents assuming that they are on the electoral register and being aggrieved when they find that they are not and cannot exercise their democratic right. The data-sharing provisions that we have included in the Bill will require electoral registration officers for the first time to review the data that they hold. If there is someone paying council tax who is not on the register, the electoral registration officer is required to go out, find that person, draw the matter to their attention and put them on the register. A number of provisions in the Bill will, we hope, ensure that the register is more complete. As we set out in Committee, when the co-ordinated online register of electors—CORE—creates national access to local registers, data sharing systems such as that in Northern Ireland might be practical for the rest of the UK. The national insurance computer can relate straight to the single body of information of the single register of electors in Northern Ireland. Under the Opposition’s proposal, the national insurance contributions system would relate to 400 different electoral registration officers, some of whom have their registers online and some who do not, some who compile their register by address and some who do so by alphabet. We will be in a better position to consider whether the Northern Ireland system can be implemented more widely when we have put in place the co-ordinated online register of electors, whereby all electoral registration officers have to put the information online and feed it into a central register.