Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Ruane Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

We hope that the process of individual electoral registration that we are pressing ahead with, and particularly the practice of comparing existing databases with the electoral register, will enable us to identify voters, old and young, who should be on the register but are not.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

The finest databases in the country are run by Experian. I recently had a meeting with it to discuss the 3.5 million people who are not on the electoral register. It informed me that not 3.5 million but 6.5 million people are not on the electoral register. What steps is the Deputy Prime Minister taking to use the private sector—companies such as Experian and others—to increase the number of registered voters?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

It is precisely to get to the bottom of exactly how many people who are not on the register but should be that we commissioned detailed research from the Electoral Commission to establish the facts. As I said earlier, we are running these projects so that we can have access to other publicly available databases to make sure that they are consistent with the electoral register.