Question

To ask the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, what assessment the Electoral Commission has made of the potential merits of auto-enrolment on the electoral register of young people when they are given their national insurance number.

The Commission believes that registering young people automatically when they are allocated their National Insurance number would be an effective way of improving completeness levels among attainers.

It recently published the findings of feasibility studies examining the potential for data sharing between organisations holding reliable information about citizens and Electoral Registration Officers. It found that data sharing could be achieved by linking national data sources to the individual electoral registration service, which is already connected to the systems used by Electoral Registration Officers to manage their electoral registers.

In this way, it would be possible for information about young people allocated National Insurance numbers to be shared with Electoral Registration Officers, to support automatic or automated electoral registration.