Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 54:"After Clause 12, insert the following new clause—" ““ELECTORAL REGISTER (1)   Copies of the electoral register may not be made available to any body other than a body designated by statute. (2)   No copies of the electoral register may be supplied, either for a fee or without a charge, to any commercial organisation, other than as may be designated by statute, or any other body that may seek to make a pecuniary gain by having access to the register. (3)   In Schedule 2 to the 1983 Act (provisions which may be contained in regulations as to registration), for paragraph 10 (as amended by section 9 of the Representation of the People Act 2000 (c. 2)) substitute— ““10   Provisions authorising or requiring a registration officer to supply copies of the register only to persons authorised to receive such copies. 10A   Provisions requiring copies of the register and other documents, or prescribed parts of them, to be available for inspection by the public at such places as may be prescribed.”””” The noble Lord said: The purpose of this new clause is to do away with the edited version of the electoral register and to ensure that the register is not made available for commercial purposes. I suspect that I am hoping for too much to be on a roll and for the Minister to use the speaking notes which she used when replying to my first amendment. When we debated the Representation of the People Bill in 2000, I argued that the electoral register should not be made available for commercial purposes. Heads of households are required by statute to return the names of all those within the household who are eligible to vote on a specified date. That is a statutory duty fulfilled for an important civic purpose. As I pointed out in 2000, voting is not compulsory but registration is. One registers in order to qualify to vote. That is the purpose of the excise. At the time we were debating the Bill, electors were not able to prevent their names and addresses being made available to commercial bodies. I argued that that situation was unacceptable in principle and that the register should not be made available other than to those bodies, such as the political parties and the police, who had a claim to copies for the purposes of fulfilling their civic duties. As I said in 2000, I could see that purchasing the register may be invaluable to commercial firms and charities, but the usefulness of access did not establish a right to access. The Government did not accept my argument that the register should not be made available but they introduced provision for electors to opt out of having their names made available to other bodies. Other forces intervened subsequently and the Representation of the People Regulations 2002 gave effect to the provision for an edited register. We thus have a full register and an edited register. I cannot see why we should maintain an edited register. It brings no benefit to the taxpayer in that it is supplied at cost. There is now a marked disparity between the full register and the edited register. Although, as far as I am aware, no great publicity was given to the provision for opting out, the proportion of electors opting out of the edited register is a substantial one. According to figures supplied by the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, the proportion of electors opting out of inclusion in the 2004 register was 29.29 per cent of eligible electors, or just over 13 million people. We are thus close to the situation where one in three people have opted out. Why do we persist with it? Perhaps the Minister could tell us how many other countries adopt a practice of making electoral registers available for commercial purposes. If making it available in that way is justifiable in principle and practice, presumably there are states other than the United Kingdom that do it. If not, perhaps the Minister would care to reflect on why not. I am not sure why registration officers should be put to the trouble of employing their limited resources for this particular exercise.