---

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I certainly think that more resources need to be put in. More people need to be registered and to participate in the vote, but it remains the case that as we stand—as has been pointed out, not many resources have been put into this—there is a systematic bias against poorer areas in terms of the number of eligible voters being reflected in the number of registered voters. If we are going to make this massive change based on a numerical system of one size fits all, that numerical system needs to be rooted in the best estimate of eligible voters, not in the number of people who happen to have registered. As we go downstream with individual registration, my fear is that things will get worse and worse as groups of people who are not very literate and so on fall off the register because they are not being registered as a household. That will produce more and more of a bias.