Red faces as Clegg votes drive begins in wrong city

The Deputy Prime Minister spoke to voters in the Hull West and Hessle constituency on Friday after claiming it had the lowest turnout in the UK, at 45.7 per cent.

The turnout was in fact far higher, at 55.1 per cent - a figure that has been on Hull Council's website since last month's General Election.

The Cabinet Office insisted Mr Clegg's figure was correct when questioned by the Yorkshire Post on Friday but it can now be confirmed it was wrong and used information supplied in error by the Association of Election Administrators (AEA).

The blunder does not affect the result in Hull West, where Alan Johnson retained the seat for Labour.

But it does mean Mr Clegg should instead have been in Manchester Central, where only 46.7 per cent of those eligible to vote did so on May 6, making it the lowest of the five British constituencies where the turnout fell below 50 per cent.

Mr Johnson said: "We always suspected something was wrong with the voter turnout statistics for Hull West. I told Nick Clegg before he visited Hull under the misapprehension that the constituency had the lowest turnout in the country and we now know it didn't even have the lowest turnout in Hull.

"I'm pleased the Yorkshire Post has unearthed this error and hope that measures are taken to ensure that only accurate and reliable statistics are published in the future."

Turnout is calculated by comparing the number of eligible voters with the number of votes cast. The AEA gave the number of eligible voters in Hull West and Hessle as 69,017, when the true figure was 57,270. A total of 31,567 votes were cast.

A spokesman for the Deputy Prime Minister said: "Nick Clegg went to Hull to listen to people. He wanted to find out what they thought about the political process, whether they felt part of it or whether they felt disengaged somehow.

"He particularly wanted to know what would make people more involved in how big decisions are taken.

"The average turnout in the General Election was just over 65 per cent in the UK and over the next few months Mr Clegg will be visiting constituencies across the country where even fewer people than that voted."