Lord Lexden
Main Page: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Lexden's debates with the Cabinet Office
(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I thank the noble Lord for his normally generous comments. The sheer heavy weight of the Labour Government’s ID proposals seemed to me and many of my colleagues to make it an unavoidable failure. There is a debate about the shift to a digital relationship between the citizen and the state, which we will have to have, and about convenience against privacy, which we need to have as we move forward. My right honourable friend Francis Maude and others working on the Government Digital Service have made a good deal of progress in that regard.
Lord Lexden (Con)
Does the Minister have any information about the growth in the number of 18 to 21 year-olds on the register?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Since 1 December, some 700,000 16 to 24 year-olds have applied to register. We do not have an exact figure on what proportion that is because the figures on how many 16 year-olds will be eligible to vote in the election are not exact because we do not have all their birthdays.