Question

To ask the hon. Member for South West Devon, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, what registration rate was achieved by use of (a) Department for Work and Pensions and (b) local authority data matching in the confirmation dry run; and what rate was achieved by using all levels of data matching in the confirmation live run.

The confirmation dry run match rate with Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) data for Great Britain is included in the Electoral Commission’s report on the dry run, which is available on its website. Across Great Britain 78% of electors could be matched with DWP. Subsequent analysis, from the trial of local data matching by 139 electoral registration officers, suggested that local data matching added an average of 6% to the overall match rate.

The results of the confirmation live run for Great Britain were included in the Commission’s recently published report on the live run in Scotland, which is also available on its website. The data for Great Britain was only available at this point as the transition to IER in Scotland began after the referendum on independence. The final match rate, after matching with DWP and local data, across Great Britain was 87%. These figures mean that overall approximately 40.5 million electors were matched.

Electoral Registration Officers are now working to target those existing electors who could not be matched, as well as those not currently on the registers at all.

The Commission will next report on the transition to Individual Electoral Registration in England and Wales in February 2015 following the publication of the registers by 1 December 2014. This report will be based on the results of our ongoing monitoring of performance as well as detailed, local authority-level data collected from EROs. A separate assessment for Scotland will be published in April 2015 following the publication of the revised registers there by 2 March 2015.