There are a few scattered posters in Central Ward, Peterborough, encouraging people to vote Labour or Conservative. Thanks to the council’s efforts to cleanse the electoral register, considerably fewer people than in recent years will be able to do so.

It was in Central Ward that, in 2004, three men attempted to rig the council election in favour of Labour by “hijacking” the postal and proxy vote application forms of members of the Asian and Portuguese communities. They were sent to prison this month.

Peterborough council’s response has been, in effect, to rip up the electoral register and start again rather than use the traditional method of updating it. At the end of last year it sent out blank forms and asked people to complete them from scratch. When the forms were returned, 8,403 voters had vanished, a decline of 7.5 per cent. In Central Ward, 1,555 people, or 29.8 per cent of the electorate, had dropped off the register.

Yet nobody whom The Times spoke to in Central Ward had any idea about the council’s cleansing operation. Only Audrey Ewen, a pensioner who had read about the change in a local newspaper, had any idea that the neighbourhood’s electoral roll had fallen so dramatically. A typical response was: “I haven’t got a great deal of interest in local elections.” Others said that they left form-filling to family members. Zakia Bi, 31, said that she would vote for whomever her father told her to, because she knew little about politics. Others spoke little English.

Could it be that Central Ward’s lost voters simply did not return their forms and have unwittingly disenfranchised themselves?

John Harrison, of Peterborough council, said that this was possible in a few cases, but added that the authority had called at properties with outstanding forms and advertised the initiative. He believes that the majority of the 8,403 have moved on or did not exist in the first place. “Peterborough has a big migrant community and people are constantly moving in and out of the borough,” he said. “It is a highly mobile population. There is a high degree of churn.”

That is the challenge facing councils countrywide, who will be watching to see how Peterborough’s efforts work out. The Electoral Commission is also interested, Mr Harrison said. Unlike, it seems, the people of Central Ward.

In proportion

— The Conservatives have 9,432 councillors in Britain, Labour 5,485 and the Liberal Democrats 4,417. The Tories overtook Labour as the party with the most councillors in 2003

— Labour’s tally of councillors peaked in 1996, when the party had 10,929 representatives on local authorities. In the same year the Lib Dems also peaked with 5,078 while the Tories slipped to their nadir of 4,276

— Turnout in local elections has been increasing since it slumped to an all-time low of 28 per cent in 1998. It reached just under 40 per cent last year

— When local elections are held on the same day as a general election, turnout increases dramatically – to 59 per cent in 2001 and 61 per cent in 2005

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