Around 7.5 million people are not properly registered to vote in Great Britain.

The Electoral Commission said its latest research suggested the number had stabilised since 2011 after rising for a decade.

But with younger people the most likely to be missing, it said it hoped a new system of online registration will start to swing things back the other way.

The commission said parliamentary registers were 85.9 per cent complete and that local government electoral registers 84.7 per cent - compared with 91 per cent and 92 per cent in 2002.