house of lords official report - United Kingdom Parliament

1105 Political Parties and Elections Bill [17 JUNE 2009] Political Parties and Elections Bill 1106
reference agencies to check the names and addresses
of people applying for credit, so helping them to get
into debt, but not for the process of recovering sums
borrowed and helping people to get out of debt. I am
not against agencies being able to utilise the full register
for that purpose. As the Credit Services Association
quite justifiably points out in its briefing:
“Desired access to the electoral roll by the direct mailing and
marketing industry should not be linked with the completely
different requirements of the debt collection industry”.
I concur. I would be content for the agencies to have
access to the full register and would support the
Government in making the necessary adjustments for
that purpose.
Secondly, as my noble friend Lord Bates observed
in Committee, if there is demand for such a product by
direct mailing and marketing bodies, market forces
will take care of it. My amendment allows time for the
market to operate. This is clearly something appropriate
to the market and not to misusing statutory provisions
for commercial purposes.
My basic point is straightforward. The process of
employing the force of law to compile the electoral
register should be confined to that task. Electoral
registration officers should be allowed to get on with
their tasks as electoral registration officers. They are
not, or rather should not be, in the business of helping
junk mail companies. Given that the costs of compiling
the edited register are not wholly recovered, we are in
effect subsidising commercial concerns. We are doing
so through the use of statute, through the use of a
provision that is fundamental to the democratic process.
Requiring people to decide whether they wish to remove
their name from the edited register is a misuse of that
process. We should restore the integrity of our electoral
registration process. We certainly should not use it to
subsidise commercial concerns.
Other democracies manage to survive without such
an edited register. Their economies do not appear to
be undermined by the absence of such a register. We
should get rid of it. It is in principle objectionable and
it imposes an unnecessary burden. I beg to move.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: My Lords, I support
my noble friend. I have been astonished by the amount
of paper that I have received on this amendment from
the Finance and Leasing Association, the Credit Services
Association, the Institute of Fundraising and the UK
Cards Association opposing him—I also received
something from the Electoral Commission supporting
him—so I listened carefully to what he had to say.
My concerns are primarily threefold. First is the
civil liberties argument. I am always concerned about
information being collected for one purpose and then
being passed on to be used for another, and my
concerns have been increased by the examples given by
my noble friend. The second is what I might describe
as an ecological argument; that is to say, I suspect that
what we are allowing here increases the volume of
junk mail that travels through all our letterboxes. It is
unnecessary, untidy and wasteful of our resources.
The third is what I describe as the economic argument.
I understand that the information is provided at cost,
and I do not see why there should not be an economic
charge for it, which would at least reward the local
authorities and those involved for the expense, trouble
and management time required to provide it. That
does not happen at present; therefore, as my noble
friend pointed out, this is a subsidising of the private
sector by the state, which is inherently undesirable.
My civil liberties argument is the most critical. We
should make every effort to ensure that information
collected is used for the purposes for which it is
collected, and not passed to somebody else for use in a
completely different way. Although the Electoral
Commission says that it has worries about the drafting
of the amendment, it strongly supports it. And given
that the Minister has so often in the past prayed in aid
the Electoral Commission when rejecting our arguments,
I hope that on this occasion he will see the logic of its
position and ensure that my noble friend’s amendment
is accepted.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: My Lords, every
possible argument in favour of this extremely sensible
proposal has been put forward by my noble friends. By
rising to speak, I give the government Front Bench an
opportunity for information to arrive from the distant
corners of the Chamber. I declare that I am a foot
soldier in the army commanded by my noble friend
Lord Norton.
Lord Bates: My Lords, in Committee my noble
friend Lord Henley and I tabled an amendment that
was similar in effect because we were persuaded by the
argument put forward. The principle was very clear
and has been ably articulated by my noble friend Lord
Norton of Louth.
It covered two pieces of very persuasive evidence.
The first was the intervention of the Information
Commissioner, Richard Thomas, and Mark Walport,
director of the medical charity the Wellcome Trust,
who, in their report published in July, said:
“The edited register is available for sale to anyone for any
purpose. Its main clients are direct marketing companies and
companies compiling directories”.
The point of this amendment is to make it clear that
one must opt into the edited register and thus make it
harder to sell information on to third parties.
In addition, the Local Government Association
carried out a survey of electoral registration officers,
98 per cent of whom wanted a change in the law to
abolish the edited register that councils have to sell to
direct marketing companies, and 88 per cent of electoral
registration officers believed that the current system
deters people from voting. The survey also found that
councils raise on average only a mere £1,900 from this
source.
Putting together all of those arguments that were
so eloquently persuasive, I rose in Grand Committee
and asked whether this was not an opportunity for
a change. I should have realised that although
taking on various groups is perhaps necessary in
the course of public life, taking on direct marketing
companies is a recipe for being inundated with e-mails,
paper and representations. They certainly lived up to
the reputation of their direct-marketing capabilities by
making representations in between the Grand Committee
and now.