Delivering the annual canvass - England

What should a Route 3 communication include?

As part of your planning for canvassing Route 3 properties you should have already considered when and how to make initial contact with a responsible person for Route 3 properties.

After this initial contact, you will need to contact them again when you are requesting the information required by the canvass and potentially to follow up with reminder requests. You should ensure that any follow up activity allows time to switch properties to a Route 2 canvass if necessary.

As a minimum, any communication must ask the responsible person to provide the following for each person who is aged 16 or over, eligible to register to vote and resident at the property:1

• Full name
• Nationality
• An indication of whether that person is aged 76 or over

You should also request the contact details (telephone number and/or email address) for each eligible resident for future contact purposes, but you should make it clear in any communication that the provision of these is optional.

You should also consider how to communicate any relevant data protection information, such as a privacy statement setting out how you will process the information and what it will be used for. You can find more information on this in our guidance on Planning for canvass communications. 

What else should I consider when making contact with a responsible person? 

Whether you contact the responsible person by email, phone, letter or by making a personal visit, you should ensure that your communications are clear and complete.

There is no prescribed form to be used for Route 3, but the prescribed Canvass Form could be useful as a template for the information you need to collect, and could be sent to the responsible person with a covering letter. Information received this way could be scanned and input into your EMS in a similar way to processing other forms.

We have produced a resource to support you with key messaging for Route 3 communications.

You could also consider whether collecting the information in another format, for example a spreadsheet, would allow for the data to be imported directly into your EMS system. This could be particularly useful when asking for information from universities, for example, where there is a high volume of information to collect. 

As with your initial contact, you should ensure that you record the steps you have taken to make contact and request the information. Further guidance on how to communicate with Route 3 properties is given in what communications should be used for Route 3 properties.