Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 45A:"Page 6, line 31, at end insert—" ““(   )   In exercising the duty under subsection (2)(a) a registration officer may send a form to a specific person who he assumes to be the appropriate person at an address.”” The noble Lord said: This amendment would give the electoral registration officer, in exercising the duty to canvass and send forms out to households, the ability to send a form to a specific person in that household,"““who he assumes to be the appropriate person at an address””." At the moment, the forms are simply sent to the householder at a particular address. In many parts of the country, they now include the entry from the previous year, so that you can just cross people off or add people on. I am not sure how universal that approach is, but it is certainly very efficient. However, the form goes to an anonymous person. In some places, the electoral registration officers do what I am suggesting in the amendment and send the form directly to the bursar of a college, for example, who can list all the people in the college and send the form back. However, there are many instances in which that does not seem to happen. Students are a particular case. The electoral registration officer ought to be communicating directly with an appropriate person in the institution. Then there is the whole question of hostels and houses in multiple occupation, where, frankly, forms get lost. The electoral registration officer may well know who lives there—at least, he may believe that he knows who lives there, because he has the register from last year and the council tax records or whatever. It would be much more efficient to send the form to a named person. For example, the form could be sent to the landlord, who would be asked to sign people up. That might be more efficient than distributing a general circular that is not addressed to anyone in particular. It is not clear to me whether electoral registration officers have that power at the moment. Under their general power to try to get people on the register, they probably can do what I have suggested. However, I have moved the amendment to probe the matter and to get a statement from the Minister that this can and ought to happen and that it is a sensible way of doing it. The other part of this is the relationship between the individuals living in a household and their right to be registered and the person who might act as head of household. Reading the debates in the House of Commons, I see that there was some discussion about the concept of head of household and whether it is now out of date. I cannot find anything about head of household in the Bill. Perhaps the Minister could comment on whether it is a concept that has fallen by the wayside over the years. Who is responsible for sending back the form when it comes and making sure that all the people at an address are listed? It is not very clear, and in many cases it operates through common sense. The corollary is whether it is possible to send forms to more than one person at each household. If the electoral registration officer is not getting anywhere with it, and if there were 15 people on the list last time, can he then write to all 15 people, or as many as he thinks is sensible, to try to get information from that address? That is the kind of question that is behind the amendment. I beg to move.