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Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath): My right hon. Friend has mentioned an issue of grave concern to me. He will be aware that I have tabled several written questions exploring concerns about the use that might be made by the credit industry of the information made available under the proposals. My hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) and I are both officers of the all-party group on insurance and financial services, and I find it extraordinary, in these days of pre-legislative scrutiny, that the Government are putting proposals before the House when they have not yet finished their consultations on the safeguards for the public.

Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend is right, and the humbug we get from the Government on that point is amazing. I sat on a Committee considering the Immigration and

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Asylum Act 1999, which was also the subject of pre-legislative scrutiny, and the same Minister also served on the Committee. We heard from him a daily mantra of how wonderful the Government were for having conducted the pre-legislative scrutiny and that a range of complex issues had been discussed in advance. We are now considering a complex issue that will affect everyone on the electoral register, as well as all the direct marketing agencies, the banks and credit checking agencies and Members of Parliament, but the Government do not have a clue about the regulations they will draw up.

It gets worse. In the previous debate, the Minister was pressed on the subject of regulations and said:

"Once new regulations governing access to the full electoral register are in place, we can expect the public and any industries which are affected to make their views known about the impact of those regulations."

He later continued:

"I have no doubt that hon. Members will continue to raise points of concern and, where appropriate, changes will be made to accommodate them."--[Official Report, 13 January 2000; Vol. 342, c. 461-62.]

That is a new doctrine from new Labour now it is in government. The attitude is, "We are not going to consult about the regulations in advance. We are going to pass them and if you don't like them, you can complain about them and we may change them later." If Ministers in the previous Government had tried that on, the Labour Opposition would have demanded emergency statements PDQ. It is an outrageous thing for a Minister to say. We know how difficult it is to change regulations after the event.

Mr. Gerald Bermingham (St. Helens, South) rose--

Mr. Maclean: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman, who is a lawyer.

Mr. Bermingham: I declare that interest. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that many regulations have been sprung on the House at the last minute in the past 10 or 15 years, and it was only when objections were raised to them that changes were made? What has changed?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Before the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) answers that point, I think that we have dealt sufficiently with the timetable surrounding the Bill. I ask Members now to deal with the contents of new clause 1.

Mr. Maclean: Certainly, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have covered the background to clause 9 and I shall now address the content--or what I believe should be the content--of the regulations.

I support new clause 1 because it attempts to make the diabolically vague clause 9 slightly better. New clause 1 would provide that

"The Secretary of State shall publish in draft any provisions he intends to make . . . and shall consult such persons and bodies as appear to him to have an interest in the operation of those provisions."

We heard from Labour Members in earlier debates about their concerns about the effect on direct marketing organisations. Denouncing junk mail is a popular pastime,

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but some junk mail we like and some we dislike. I have no particular objection to junk mail from a direct marketing organisation that may have obtained my name from the electoral register. If I do not like the wine on offer from Bordeaux Direct, I do not have to buy it and I can put the leaflet in the bin. If I do not want the thermal slippers from Kaleidoscope, I do not have to buy them. However, I am forced to deal with the junk mail I get from Members of Parliament and national lobby groups trying to blackmail me into supporting one cause or another in the House. I wish I could remove myself from that list.

I suspect that all the 35 million people on the electoral register have different views about the junk mail that they would not like to receive. However, I do not know how many organisations would consider it vital to have access to the full register but would be prohibited from doing so under the Bill. If those organisations were to be consulted before the regulations were drafted, the Government would have a chance to get them right. That is not a political point, because if any Government planned to make regulations that introduced two types of register--one with all the names on and one without some names--I know from my Home Office experience that a dozen organisations could stake a legitimate claim to one version of the list and another dozen would feel as strongly that the first lot should not get that version.

6 pm

In addition, what about the charities, some of which have been mentioned? I and other hon. Members received some very worrying correspondence from St. Dunstan's, the marvellous charity that helps people blinded, or partially blinded, as a result of military service. Every year that organisation, like other charities, sends out about 3 million letters and circulars to targeted people. Some would call that junk mail. I do not know where the mailing list comes from, or whether the charity buys it, or from whom. However, I think that the electoral register plays a key role as no charity would want to spend a fortune on the expensive lists available commercially.

I made a special trip to talk to the charity's organisers. Their sense that they were not getting proper support from the Government or the national lottery is not relevant to the debate, but they emphasised that their charity needed mailing lists for the millions of letters sent out. There are many other charities, of course.

Will the Minister say what position charities involved in direct mail operations will occupy in the future? What effect will the Bill have on other, commercial direct operations?

Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): I am struck by what my right hon. Friend has said about charities. Is he not worried that the Bill will prevent charities from targeting their fund-raising activities on middle-class or prosperous households, with the result that they will get less than at present?

Mr. Maclean: I agree that that is a worry. Charities use the electoral register, Yellow Pages, postcode data and other data that they buy from other organisations. Target markets depend on what they want to sell or the funding that they want to raise: their target audience need not be

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middle class but could be any social group. The Bill could prohibit that activity. The new clause would at least give charities a chance to bring that difficulty to the Government's attention.

I have never won the Reader's Digest prize draw but I do not mind putting that magazine's circular in the bin, yet that advertising is precisely what the Government seem to want to stop. If that is their prejudice, so be it, but clause 9 and the Government's reluctance to consult about the regulations mean that other, legitimate operations--such as charities--would suffer.

Mr. Rowe: If hundreds of people are entitled to have access to the unrestricted register, is not it almost certain that some of them will engage in illegal practices? The demand for the register is great, and its availability vast. Will we not be creating a jungle of potential crime?

Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend prompts me to bring forward the point with which I intended to conclude my contribution. In my little computer case in my office I have a compact disc entitled "Info UK". It contains more than 49 million names and addresses.

Mr. Forth: Gosh.

Mr. Maclean: Some telephone contact numbers are also included, although I do not use them. I acquired the CD--for about £49.50--because I was told that it existed. I did not believe that it could contain so many names and addresses, but it does. I could enter the name of almost any hon. Member, and acquire the relevant address.

Mr. Bermingham: Does the right hon. Gentleman have so much time to waste that he can check 49 million names?

Mr. Forth: He will read them out in a moment.

Mr. Maclean: I shall not go down that route, but there are various ways to waste time. Some would say that it is more interesting to read 49 million names and addresses than to read the speeches or court case reports of the hon. Member for St. Helens, South (Mr. Bermingham).

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. It is true that there are many different ways of wasting time, and the right hon. Gentleman is verging on one.

Mr. Maclean: That is why I shall not be tempted out of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

The CD that I have described is already in wide circulation and is constantly updated. A different worry stems from the forthcoming CD containing aerial photographs of every house in the country. When the two discs are amalgamated, there could be serious security breaches involving senior police and military officers, politicians and others.

A large industry exists with access to the electoral register, but that comprises only a small part of a comprehensive database that can be easily searched and which is easily available. I suspect that most of the information on that database is bought from other companies. Every time we subscribe to an organisation or a Christmas catalogue, we have to tick a box to prevent our names being passed on to other companies.

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Huge resources are devoted to the compilation of information. All the telephone directories and full lists of internet and e-mail addresses are available on computer. The Government can try to restrict access to the full register as much as they like, but the one copy that may be made available to a credit card checking company may well be sufficient to act as authentication for the almost total picture already compiled about the 56 million people in the country.

Hypothetically, we could abolish the electoral register completely. However, I suspect that it would remain possible to garner enough information from telephone directories, the internet and other sources to provide a pretty accurate register.

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