Electoral Administration Bill

There is nothing between us here, but we believe that the way in which the amendment is framed would affect the annual canvass. The point that I sought to make is that you would need blanket coverage to do this effectively. I worry that people would not open the envelope. Outside of the annual canvass, there is nothing to prevent an electoral registration officer who thinks that someone is living in a property and can name them from sending a letter to that named individual asking them to fill in a form. That would achieve what the noble Lord is seeking. However, the amendment would not achieve that. To recap, for the purpose of the annual canvass, where we are trying to capture everyone by sending the form out usually to the occupier or householder, there is nothing to prevent more than one form from being sent out. In general, it is one form per house, although perhaps that is more appropriate for what the noble Lord described as the more ““traditional”” areas. Let us call it the traditional method. It will capture a huge of range of people and not run the risk of failing to catch them because they do not open post that is not theirs. Beyond that, in rolling registration, if the electoral registration officer accesses information by the methods that we discussed earlier, he can write to them directly. There is no difficulty about that. But that would come under rolling registration rather than the annual canvass, and that is where we have difficulty with the amendment.