Millions missing from electoral roll 'distort democracy'

JOHN RENTOUL

Political Correspondent

Three years after the abolition of the poll tax, 3 million people are still estimated to be missing from the electoral register and the situation is not improving, according to a new analysis of official figures produced by Harry Barnes, Labour MP for Derbyshire North-east.

"This is a serious distortion of our democracy, which the Government is failing to address because it benefits from the situation as it stands," Mr Barnes said yesterday.

Mr Barnes and the pressure group Full Franchise are calling for a big registration drive before the next election. And they urge the Government to bring in a rolling register instead of the "antiquated and cumbersome" annual process so that "people can register to vote whenever and wherever they happen to be living".

The figures suggest that one person in every fifty stopped registering to vote around the time the poll tax was brought in in 1990, because the electoral roll was one of the main sources of information used in compiling the poll tax register.

Before then, estimates based on the census showed that more than 97 per cent of the population was registered to vote. After the poll tax, the proportion dropped to 95 per cent, and remained at that level in the latest figures for 1994.

Mr Barnes points out that the council tax, which replaced the poll tax in 1992, still acts as a disincentive to people claiming their democratic rights. The discount for people living alone means that additional people in a household have an incentive to keep their names off the electoral roll, which can be checked by council tax collectors.

The figures vary greatly across the country. The proportion of voters "missing" is highest in London, averaging 11 per cent against the national average of 5 per cent. The City of Westminster has most missing - 33 per cent - followed by Kensington and Chelsea with 28 per cent, and Islington, 20 per cent.

Mr Barnes has also won an admission from Dennis Roberts, the director of statistics at the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS), that the official figures underestimate the number of missing voters.

On the basis of census estimates, about 2 million voters are missing in England and Wales. But the census itself is evaded by some people who are hard to trace or reluctant to deal with officialdom, including some who were trying to avoid the poll tax in 1991.