800,000 voters disappear from electoral roll

More than 800,000 voters disappeared from the electoral roll in 2014 after a new registration method came into effect, according to data published by the Office for National Statistics on Thursday.

The move to individual registration from household registration is thought to be one of the causes of the fall. Previously, voters could be registered by a head of household. The change is expected to disproportionately affect young people and students who live in communal accommodation such as university halls of residence.

The figures are an updated version of previously released information and they do not include those who have registered since December 1, 2014. The final deadline to register for the upcoming general election is April 20.

While no one is being removed from the register for the general election, the Electoral Commission believes the fall is due to homemovers, students and attainers - those who are below 18 but will be eligible to vote by the time of the election - not registering in the first place.

Individual registration came into effect in June 2014 in England and Wales and in September 2014 in Scotland.

Commenting on the figures, the Electoral Commission said "[Individual electoral registration] has replaced the previous, out-of-date Victorian system, where one person in each household registered everyone to vote, with a requirement to register individually. In addition, as part of the move to IER, for the first time ever, people are also now able to register online."

The Electoral Commission also stressed that no one would be removed from the register before the 2015 general election and that 2m people had applied to register since the figures were compiled, although many of them may already be on the electoral roll.

England and Wales had falls of about two per cent in the number of registered voters, while Northern Ireland, which has yet to see the change, saw an increase, as did Scotland, probably due to the independence referendum energising previous non-voters and leading to more canvassers contacting eligible voters.

Regions which saw the biggest fall in registered voters tended to be in the north of the UK. The northeast of England fell 3.5 per cent.

Constituencies with the biggest fall have a strong university presence. The largest drop was in Cardiff Central which saw an 18.3 per cent drop, followed by Liverpool Riverside, Newcastle upon Tyne East, Nottingham South and Ceredigion.

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The change in the electoral roll is thought to benefit the Conservatives as younger voters are more likely to vote for the opposition Labour party and may deepen Labour's problem of turning mild support into votes.

Commenting on the figures Labour's Sadiq Khan said "It's scandalous how many millions of people aren't registered to vote and how little David Cameron has done about it. Time and again the Tories and Lib Dems were warned that our democracy was being eroded by falling numbers of people signed up to vote yet they buried their heads in the sand. They failed to act because they don't want to be held to account for their record."

He also said that while his party's priority was to get people registered to vote by April 20, a future Labour government may introduce block registration for many of those in communal accommodation and would "explore using data held on people to automatically register them to vote".

An analysis by the FT of the initial figures published earlier this year found that Labour-held marginals had seen a bigger decline in the number of registered voters than Conservative marginals.

However, the change may go some way to mitigating the effects of differential turnout and unequally sized constituencies that previously have made it easier for the Labour party to more efficiently convert their vote share into seats.

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