Your registration plan

While your public engagement strategy will help you identify the registration challenges in your area and a general approach for tackling them, your registration plan should be informed by it and capture the detailed actions of everything that needs to be done to maintain electoral registers that are as accurate and complete as possible – not just throughout the canvass period, but throughout the year.

What should a registration plan include?

Your registration plan should capture all registration activity throughout the year, including in the lead up to scheduled polls and during the canvass. 

We have produced a template registration plan you can use to support your planning for the delivery of electoral registration services. You do not have to use the template provided.

It is important that you treat your registration plan as a living document and keep it under regular review using available data to monitor progress and to identify where any amendments need to be made.

At a minimum, your registration plan should cover: 

• a timetable of deliverables and tasks which should demonstrate how you intend to carry out the necessary steps under Section 9A, both during the canvass and throughout the year
• details of planned partnership activity
• details of how you will implement your strategy for engaging with 14-17 year-olds in your area.
• details on how you will manage the processes you are required to follow to verify the identity of 14 and 15 year olds, including how you will access and use educational records and any other records for these purposes.
• objectives and success measures
• resource requirements
• review of internal processes to ensure they remain relevant, including what measures you have put in place to ensure data protection requirements are met
• identification of training needs, both for external and internal sources of training
• mechanisms for tracking and evaluating progress and for recording amendments
• processes to identify any patterns of activity that might indicate potential integrity problems, including what steps are to be taken to deal with any such problems

You will need systems in place that enable you to track your progress towards ensuring that as many eligible residents as possible are included on the register. This should include processes to track responses from individuals and households to monitor, evaluate and target resources to identify where amendments to your plans are required.

You also need to maintain a risk and issues register, identifying any risks to the effective delivery of your registration plan and corresponding mitigating actions.

We have developed a template risk and issues register that you can use to record any risks you identify. It contains examples that you will need to consider and, if necessary, mitigate, as well as a log to record any issues that emerge and that you will need to address. Alternatively, you may wish to include risks including our examples in any risk management documentation you have already developed.