The wrong sort of no fixed abode: how some people struggle to get on electoral register

The Independent reports:

In 1995 I made the decision, for both romantic and financial reasons, to live on a boat…

The boat is now at a recognised mooring that my husband and I rent from the landowner. The problem is, this patch that we have come to call home is not an official residential mooring – in other words, in the eyes of the local authority, it does not exist as an address where people live…

Nonetheless, I was aware that as a UK citizen, I was still entitled to vote, somehow or other. So I telephoned the Electoral Services of the local London borough and explained my predicament. The bewildered voice on the other end of the line should have been a warning.

“A boat? I dunno… I’ll have to ask.”

Here we go. A few minutes later she came back, having missed the entire point.

“You just use the address of your mooring,” she said in a bored monotone.

“Well, no…” I began to repeat the whole story, “The point is that the mooring isn’t a registered residential address.” …

[After various failed efforts to register] What my informal enquiries had revealed was that I would need to register as “No Fixed Address with a Declaration of Local Connection”, a category for people who are associated with a specific area but don’t have an officially recognised residence there… [When a form for this was sent to me] it arrived with a letter explaining under what circumstances someone could make a declaration of local connection.

There were three viable reasons: 1) you are homeless; 2) you are on remand; and 3) you are a patient in a mental health hospital. I felt slightly boring, merely living on a boat…

Joan, a journalist who lives on a yacht, told me she would like to know how to register but had assumed it wasn’t possible, because “being of no fixed abode is tricky”, she explained. “There is no option for ‘unfixed boat/caravan/camper’”…

I finally managed to register but it was tiresome and frustrating and it’s easy to see why someone could be discouraged by the hoop-jumping and poor advice that litters the path to the polling station. Whether this postcodeless minority will be voting in the general election remains to be seen.