This time last year we saw the most fundamental change in the process of electoral registration with the move from household registration. This moved registration from where a head of household was responsible for registering all those eligible to vote at that address, to one where everyone was responsible for their own voter registration. Twelve months on, and millions of pounds later, it is difficult to understand what problem the government was trying to solve.

It certainly has not helped improve the poor level of voter registration in the United Kingdom with an estimated seven million eligible voters missing from the register. In fact the number of voters on the electoral register actually declined by 800,000 between December 2013 and December 2014, at a time of growing population especially in our major cities.

A multimillion pound publicity campaign and the interest engendered by a general election did increase the level of registration. However, local campaigns also had to ‘carry over’ a large number of electors – those who failed to respond to inquiries from Electoral Registration Offices. In some areas these were substantial numbers: 56,000 in Manchester (15 per cent of the electorate) and 25,000 in Lewisham (13 per cent of the electorate). Nationally, over two million electors were carried over for the general election.

The government have to decide when these names will be removed from the electoral register if they continue not to respond to official letters. The first opportunity to do this is December 2015, a date that has particular significance I will argue later.

There is also no evidence that it has helped to reduce fraud in elections. Here the real problem is not registration but the easy availability of postal votes.

Moreover, despite all the publicity we actually have not abolished the household canvass at all. So this autumn every household will be sent a form for the much derided ‘head of household’ to complete. Each of the names listed will be contacted and will then need to have their details verified and then individually contacted by post to confirm if they are eligible to be on the register. Cash strapped local councils will see their administrative work more than double through this entirely paper based process. Electoral registration officers will now have to maintain direct contact with more than 48 million individual voters – rather than twenty million households. The only organisations to benefit from this bold leap forward are the Post Office and suppliers of official stationary.

It is increasingly apparent that the Electoral Commission failed to think through some of the consequences of the move to individual electoral registration.

Heads of households have for years happily added ‘attainers’ – 16-17-year-olds – to the electoral list. No one was asked to do this in 2014 which saw a collapse of their numbers in several areas. For example, the number in Liverpool went from 2,500 to 76.

Equally, for years, universities have been able to register their eligible students as an ‘institutional landlord’. This option was removed under individual electoral registration. The consequence for a large number of universities was that registration went from 100 per cent of those eligible to less than 10 per cent. In many towns where students represent a large part of the population this has had a disproportionate impact on the overall levels of registration.

The tragedy is that we have missed the opportunity to transform the whole process of voter registration by moving from a household canvass process to one that tracks all voters as soon as they become eligible to vote. The model worth taking lessons from is in Australia (and one I know well from the Australian election campaign in 2014) where the individual states and federal government combine to produce one of the world’s most efficient systems of voter registration – at a fraction of the cost of the hybrid system we are now introducing in the UK. Australian states invest a lot of resources in identifying those eligible to vote, including a well-organised programme with schools and colleges. Once on the register you stay on it. They achieve this with an impressive IT system that cross-references all the relevant databases such as driving licences, housing lists and university registers. The state of Victoria, with a population of 3.5 million people, has a register which is 95 per cent accurate and an office which employs a staff of five. They finally cross-reference with the state register to ensure all those who have died are removed from the voters list.

So in that great British tradition we have ended up with the worst of all worlds. For those who claim that it is so simple to fill in a registration form you have to ask why we have made the process so complex, and one that has to be repeated every time an individual changes address. Compared to the Australian system we have placed the onus on the individual to cope with a complex bureaucracy, which assumes that every time a person moves that this is an entirely fresh claim and proof of eligibility is needed. It is as if every time we changed jobs we had to apply for a work permit.

It is increasingly evident that the introduction of individual voting has impacted differently on different groups of voters. Recent estimates suggest that if you are a pensioner living in the shires in your own house there is a 90 per cent chance that you will be on the electoral register. If you are young, living in private rented accommodation in a major city it is under 10 per cent.

Needless to say there are a host of unintended consequences to the way that we have introduced individual electoral registration in the UK.

As we draw our potential jurors from the electoral register, the disappearance of large numbers of 18-30-year-olds means that in future juries will be increasingly unrepresentative of the local population with all the implications for our legal system.

Furthermore, if the forthcoming EU referendum is held in university term time then the millions of students currently not registered at their term time address may well miss out on exercising a preference.

The constitutional affairs select committee, the one select committee that took a genuine interest in voter registration and its impact on democracy, was quietly abolished after the general election. However the ‘perfect storm’ for parliamentary democracy rests with the pending review of parliamentary constituencies. Emboldened with a majority in the Commons the prime minister has indicated that he wants to proceed with a reducation to 600 members of parliament. The electoral register that determines that re-distribution will be the one in place in December 2015.

That register will be compiled from September 2015. We will stumble through a process of individual registration with no high profile publicity campaign in place, councils facing further cuts to their overall budgets and the issue of student registration unresolved.

Moreover, while the Electoral Commission have recommended that the millions of voters whose details were ‘carried over’ for the general election remain on the register until December 2016, the government are perfectly entitled to ignore this and remove those voters from December 2015.

Put all this together and we face a boundary review being conducted on the worst-ever electoral register. This problem is not uniformly spread across the UK. It is the urban areas, especially London and our larger cities, which have seen the biggest deterioration in the accuracy of the electoral register. If we proceed as planned we will see a huge transfer of parliamentary representation from the towns to the shires when the population trends are the exact opposite.

America may not have much to teach us about politics but electoral registration is one thing they do get right. They base their entitlement to elected representatives on population statistics reflecting eligible voters, not the registered electorate.

The clumsy introduction of individual voter registration in the UK, which has broken the link between the eligible and the registered electorate, means that if we care about parliamentary democracy we are going to have to do the same here.

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Paul Wheeler writes on local politics.

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Photo: SecretLondon123