Great Britain is to become a democracy – but not quite yet. That’s the message that emerged from a ‘historic’ but little-reported late-night announcement by the justice minister last week.

With only a few hours’ warning to opposition parties, Michael Wills told the Commons that individual voter registration would be extended from Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK. It was a ‘radical and unprecedented move’, the minister said, and one that would ‘transform the system of electoral registration’.

In Great Britain, the head of each household is responsible for registering the names of all voters living there. Now that postal ballots are so easy to obtain, the system makes wide-scale personation all too easy – ‘vote early and vote often’.

So the government’s support for an enforceable one-person, one-vote system was welcomed by the Electoral Commission, the independent body that registers political parties. But don’t hold your breath. The reforms will not be fully implemented before 2017, if then. In the meantime, there will be little that anybody can do to prevent a head of household registering ineligible names or ‘stealing’ the votes of genuine residents.

Why the delay? It’s because a system of individual registration will not work unless voters are required to prove their identities. That strikes me as reasonable enough, although the same argument applies even more strongly to the head of household at present. But, said Mr Wills, requiring individuals to provide personal information for the first time is ‘very likely to deter some – perhaps many – from registering’ unless the government ‘takes important remedial action’.

For starters, said the minister, electoral registration officers needed to raise their game: of those eligible to vote, roughly one person in 10 is not on the roll. Second, the government is promising legislation that would allow registration officers to obtain personal information from public bodies such as HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions. That naturally raised some data-protection concerns among MPs, though Mr Wills promised safeguards.

But identifying people who might not otherwise register is not the same as introducing individual voter registration. This was a ‘profound change’, said the minister, and one that would recognise, for the first time, ‘the shift that took place long ago from the household franchise to the individual’.

Legislation would allow electoral registration officers to collect ‘personal identifiers’ – such as date of birth, signature and national insurance number – from electors. This would at first be voluntary, beginning during the autumn 2010 annual canvass.

‘From autumn 2015,’ Mr Wills continued, ‘all people making new registrations – for instance, if they are moving house and reregistering or entirely new to the register – will have to provide their identifiers to be put on to the register. Anyone already on the register in autumn 2015 who does not provide their identifiers will be carried forward for a further two years to 2017. From that point on, there will be full compulsion and we will have full individual registration.’

But, the minister added immediately, compulsory provision of identifiers would not be brought in unless the commission was satisfied that it would not compromise the accuracy or comprehensiveness of the register. So there might still be another two or three general elections under existing arrangements.

The plans were broadly welcomed by opposition parties, though there were bitter complaints that the government’s formal amendments to its Political Parties and Elections Bill were not available on the day that the bill completed all its Commons stages last week and was sent to the Lords. As David Howarth said for the Liberal Democrats, the data-sharing measures before the Commons were not being properly debated and the reforms that were being debated were not before the house.

Jonathan Djanogly, a solicitor with SJ Berwin and a Conservative front-bench spokesman, told me that the government’s late conversion was a ‘welcome surprise’, given that ministers had not heeded the Tories’ calls over the past four years to introduce individual voter registration. While accepting that the reforms depended on a concerted effort by registration officers, the MP believed that they could be implemented much more quickly, in the next two or three years.

Richard Price QC, who specialises in election law, agreed that the problem of ‘ghost voters’ – people who do not exist, or who do not reside at the stated address – needed tackling now, not in 2017. ‘Cases over the past seven years have shown that this abuse of the registration system facilitates fraudulent applications for postal votes in the names of the ghost voters,’ he said. ‘A simple solution would be to repeal the legislation that introduced postal voting on demand until individual voter registration is made compulsory.’

Meanwhile, MPs got their own back on the government in a curious way. Julian Lewis, a Tory spokesman, had tabled an amendment that would allow parliamentary candidates to keep their home addresses confidential.

The clause had not even been moved, let alone discussed, by the time the debate had to end. But Dr Lewis asked for the amendment to be put to MPs on the ground that it was consistent with decisions previously taken by the House. It was then carried on a largely free vote.

The MP said later that having to provide their home addresses was an anachronism dating back to a time when candidates could not declare their party affiliation. He was concerned about the risk to members from ‘obsessives, criminals, nut cases and terrorists’.

And ghost voters, perhaps?