Electoral Registration

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the money is being allocated among local authorities according to the results of the confirmation dry run, which showed that we are getting up to an 80% level of confirmation, and indeed sometimes up to 85%, from data matching. However, there are a number of local authorities, including Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, where, because of the transient population, registration is much lower. Places such as those, where people move frequently, and others with a large number of students or private landlords will be granted large amounts of money to target those groups.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister update us on the proposals to cross-reference the databank of the DWP with the electoral registration databank for the purposes of informing those who have not registered but are on the DWP databank, and to encourage them to register? What precedent does this cross-referencing of data from a government department set for information supplied by citizens to a government department for the exclusive use of that department and the purposes that it is meant to carry out?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That is a very good question on a very difficult and complex area. It raises questions of privacy as well as convenience. The DWP database has been used for data matching, but in one direction and with very careful procedures so that we were not transferring data, just checking their existence. There are a number of other local and national databases that have been used. It has been discovered, for example, that you can raise quite significantly your confidence that people are there if you use local databases, such as benefit boxes and council tax, as well as national databases.