EU Referendum: Voter Registration — House of Lords, 2016-06-08
Topic: Civil Rights
James Bridges (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now report in the form of a Statement the Answer given by my honourable friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office to an Urgent Question in another place on voter registration in the EU Referendum. The Statement is as follows "Whatever your view on the question, or whatever anyone else’s view, the EU referendum is a very important moment in our democracy. My strong view, and the view of the Government, is that anyone eligible to should be able to register to vote. Over the past three months, 4.5 million people have applied to register to vote. Very high levels of voter registration have been successfully handled over the last month. In the last week alone, more than a million people have applied Yesterday, 525,000 people successfully completed their applications. This is a record. At its peak yesterday, the website was handling three times the volume of applications compared to the previous record peak, which was just before the general election last year. Unfortunately, due to this unprecedented demand, there were problems with the website from 10.15 last night. To give an idea of the scale of the demand, the peak before the 2015 election was 74,000 per hour. Last night, the system processed 214,000 per hour at its peak before it crashed. Many who applied to register before 10.15 pm were successful, but unfortunately many were not. The problems with the website were resolved around midnight We are urgently looking at all options and talking to the Electoral Commission about how we can extend the deadline for applying to register to vote in the EU referendum. The website is now open and working, and we strongly encourage people to register to vote online. Anyone who has already registered does not need to submit a fresh application. We are also offering resources to electoral registration officers to cover any extra administrative costs A huge amount of work has gone into encouraging people to register to vote in a timely fashion. We began a registration drive ahead of the May elections. From 19 April, we began in earnest to promote voter registration from government departments, local authorities and civil society organisations to boost voter registration ahead of this important decision for the British people. I want to pay tribute to the work of the many people—everyone from Idris Elba to Emma Watson—supporting this drive. We have been targeting under-registered groups and have seen consistently high numbers registering throughout the last few weeks, particularly in the last week. It is in all our interests to ensure that as many people as possible are able to vote on 23 June at one of the most important moments in our democracy for over a generation" That concludes the Statement made to the other place. However, it might be helpful to your Lordships if I explain that since the exchange in the other place—following discussions with the Electoral Commission and given the strong cross-party support expressed in the other place—we have decided to introduce secondary legislation to extend the deadline for voter registration until midnight tomorrow. Having taken the decision today, we think it is right to extend the deadline to 9 June to allow people who have not yet registered time to get the message that registration is still open and to get themselves registered.