Councils have been invited to run a data matching scheme by the Cabinet Office for individual voter registration. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? What really impresses me is that they have identified fourteen potential data sources.
- The register of deaths
- Council Tax register records
- Registers of households in multiple occupations
- Local land and property gazetteers
- Housing benefit applications
- List of persons in residential and care homes; and where allowed
- Details of attainers (those aged 16 or 17) held by educational departments.
- DVLA provisional licence database
- Child benefit database
- National insurance and PAYE recording system
- DWP customer information system and housing benefit
- National pupil database (NPD)
- Royal Mail national change address update
- MOD joint personnel administration system
Remember the fuss about sharing data in ContactPoint (deceased). Is it very different?
My concern is the squawks I expect to hear from civil libertarians that object to any form of information sharing. The sane thing to do is to enact legislation that would allow use of these records, and more, for verifying voter registration. I wonder if Ian Trenholm and other local authority chief executives would agree.
