EDDC is advertising for Electoral Registration Canvassers to work between 22 September 2014 and 28 November 2014 advertising the pay as £1.89 per signed-up voter plus a bonus of 25p for each voter if you get 95% of your list completed plus 45p per mile expenses. Hours will necessarily be anti-social if you are checking on people who work. The advertisement doesn’t say how many homes each canvasser will have to visit or how areas are divided up.
Applications online at eastdevon.gov.uk. Interview date: 15 September 2014
East Devon Watch 
So, the statutory minimum wage is £6.31 per hour, so to meet that the canvassers will need to sign-up 3.34 voters per hour and assuming an average of 2 voters per household, that means 1.68 households per hour or 35 minutes per household signed-up (including travel time to and from the household, visits when no one is in, households that turn out to not qualify as voters, households who still don’t want to register etc.) This seems to me to be pretty optimistic – so in practice they are likely to earn below minimum wage (but that is “ok” [sic.] because they are effectively self-employed).
Another way of looking at this is to look at their voter targets. Whilst there were 6,000 – 7,000 missing voters, the ERO has since announced that 3,000 of these have now registered. So there are 3,000 – 4,000 citizens still unregistered, or say 1,500 to 2,000 households. These will be split across 10 canvassers, so each canvasser will have 300-400 voters to register in 150-200 households.
They need to visit each household a maximum of 2 times, so lets say an average of 1.5 times per household, which means a total of 225-300 visits over the 9 weeks or up to 33 visits per week. Assuming that you visit a town per evening / day (i.e. 7 towns per week – 5 households per town) and a 20 minute drive each way from home to a town, and 10 minutes getting to each property, and either 0 minutes knocking and waiting or 30 minutes introducing and talking, that is an average of 15 minutes per household – so you would spend a total of 165 minutes or 2 hrs 45m to sign up 5 voters i.e. perhaps £3.86 per hour.
Looking at it yet another way, over the 9 week fixed-term period of the job, assuming that they sign up every voter and including the bonus, they can earn a maximum of £856 in total or £95.11 per week. However it seems to me that, however diligent they are, the 95% target to get the bonus payment is quite likely to be missed, in which case if they achieved 94% they would earn only £710 over 9 weeks or under £79 per week.
Whichever way you calculate it, this is not exactly a living wage.
So we are likely to get either:
1. Candidates who feel that they should do this for the good of democracy and the community, with the pay being an extra. If EDDC can find these, brilliant!! But I fear they may be few and far between;
2. Candidates who don’t have the intelligence to think about the realities of what they will (or won’t) be earning. After they have done this for a couple of weeks and not made any money, will they continue or will they give up? And if they give up, then how will the canvassing actually get done?
3. Candidates who are so desperate for cash that they don’t mind working for a pittance. You have to wonder what type of people these would be. And let’s not forget that if they are on benefits, then what they earn will be reduced by the benefits they lose.
Why, oh why, does this remind me of the catchphrase of Private Frazer in Dad’s Army??? “We’re doomed!!! Doomed!!!”
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