---

Electoral Administration Bill

It is correct. Registration in Northern Ireland dipped to a percentage in the low 80s, and after a registration drive it went up to 92 per cent. In the UK, with 4.5 million people missing from the register, the figure is 92 per cent., so we are starting from the base that Northern Ireland is currently at. Any additional barriers put in place will reduce that percentage. In Northern Ireland, 92 per cent. is an average. In many of the Belfast seats, which probably include the poorest communities in the whole of the UK, registration is at 70 per cent. In my constituency, the poorest registration area is central Denbigh, at 76 per cent. Some wards in Aberystwyth have 50 per cent. registration. That is completely unacceptable. We need to get those people on to the register. If we start to introduce barriers such as signatures, dates of birth and national insurance numbers, we will keep on adding to the number of people who are unregistered. We might go from 4.5 million to 7.5 million unregistered people, who will be concentrated in the poorest communities in the UK. We do not have a fully functioning democracy if 7.5 million of the most dispossessed people are off the register.