united-kingdom elections
Am I legally required to ask information to my housemates and complete Official Household Information Response on their behalf?
<p>I'm Italian and I live in a shared house in the UK.</p>
<p>I've received an e-mail from Cambridge City Council electoral services which starts like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We recently sent a letter to ask householders to confirm who is eligible to register to vote at your address in Cambridge.</p>
<p>Please take action so that we can check who is eligible to register to vote at your address. Please complete the steps below by 30/08/2021 so that we do not have to send further reminders or ask one of our electoral canvassers to make contact with your address.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then a link is provided for me to click so that I can edit or add new electors to the list of already registered electors.</p>
<p>At the moment the list contains only 3 people (including me) out of the 7 that currently live in this shared house I live in, because me and the other two are apparently the only 3 that have cared about reading letters and taking action accordingly.</p>
<p>As regards the other 4, they have apparently been ignoring this letters and/or have not taken action to set everything up as regards them living in this household.</p>
<p>If I was to add them to the list, I'd have to, at the minimum, add this information for each of them</p>
<ul>
<li>Name</li>
<li>Surname</li>
<li>E-mail address and/or telephone number</li>
</ul>
<p>and I might not know anything else than the <em>name</em>. Not to say that, assuming I know the phone number/e-mail of one of them, that one could tell me &quot;Why did you insert my info without my permission?&quot;. And no, I don't wish to go in each room in the house to let them know of this letter from the Council.</p>
<p>Therefore my question is: am I legally required to complete the form on their behalf? Or can I just press <em>Continue</em> and confirm only the 3 names that are listed?</p>
<p>Should I just write to <code>elections@cambridge.gov.uk</code> and let them know that there's other 4 people in the house I don't know e-mail/phone number of?</p>

<p><a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2001/341/regulation/23/made" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Section 23 of The Representation of the People (England and Wales) Regulations 2001</a> states that &quot;A registration officer may require any person to give information required for the purposes of that officer’s duties in maintaining registers of parliamentary and local government electors&quot;, and describes the offence of failing to assist with that. As paragraph 2 mentions, there may also be implications under the Juries Act 1974.</p>
<p>But we're not there yet.</p>
<p>The e-mail you've received seems to give you another course of action : do nothing, and they will &quot;send further reminders or ask one of our electoral canvassers to make contact with your address&quot;. So doing nothing at this point is a valid and legal action that the Council have already considered.</p>
<p>There's something of a &quot;digital divide&quot; problem going on here - since you've responded on line, that's the way the City Council are expecting the household to respond. But there will be people in Cambridge who do not use e-mail (or do not want to use it for this) and even some who do not have a wired home telephone. These will be declining numbers these days, but if all else fails a paper letter will come through the door.</p>
<p>It would be a good idea for someone to take the role of the main householder - even if just to indicate names of the other occupants to the &quot;electoral canvasser&quot; when they arrive. Assuming it's you who opens the door, &quot;I've told them to do it&quot; would be a reasonable thing for you to say (assuming you have).</p>
<p>So there is an obligation - eventually - to provide the information you know, even if it's not complete. But based on the communication you've just received we're a long way from there at the moment.</p>
<p>[Edit : I've just re-read the question and there's a possible legal pitfall. Depending on the wording, clicking &quot;Continue&quot; on the web form may be taken as your statement that there are only three people in the house. This could be considered false information, so don't do that.]</p>
<p>[Further edit : Though there's currently no legal requirement to act, it wouldn't hurt to advise the Council that you are unable to complete the web form as you are one occupant in a shared house. If the case is later passed from canvasser to Registration Officer, you'll be able to demonstrate that you did all you could.]</p>
