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Lord Norton of Louth: My Lords, I do not wish to go over the discussion we had during the passage of the Representation of the People Act. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, will doubtless remember those discussions well. I find the need to have a full electoral register and an edited one a rather heavy-handed way of ensuring that electors can remove their names from lists sold to commercial bodies. I should have preferred one register, with that register not being available for commercial use. The present situation is thus not ideal. However, I concede that it is the reality.

Given that we are to have an edited register, I make just two points on the regulations before us. I refer to the forms prescribed under Regulation 4 in both sets of regulations. The first concerns the form to accompany the electoral registration form. It explains that there are two versions of the register and there is a short paragraph on the edited register. Given how

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short these sections are, and given that the situation is a new one, I hope that the Minister can give some assurances that there will be more to educating citizens about the edited version than simply the words contained in the form. Otherwise, I fear that there is the danger that many electors may not realise that they have the right to have their name excluded from the register that is sold to commercial concerns.

The second point concerns the electoral registration form. Under the England and Wales regulations, the heading of the relevant column reads:

"If the person does not wish his or her name to appear on the edited register enter [a tick] below".

That construction strikes me as somewhat awkward and may well confuse many who have to complete the form. I reflected after I had read the regulations whether a better form of words was possible. I thought of one. I then looked at the regulations for Scotland. I find there a different formulation of words, more or less along the lines that had occurred to me. In the electoral registration form in the regulations for Scotland, the relevant heading reads:

"If the person wishes their name to be excluded from the edited register enter [a tick] below".

That strikes me as a much clearer and less ambiguous form of words.

Can the Minister advise the House why there is a difference between the two registration forms and whether there is a possibility at this late stage of changing the wording in the registration form that is to be used in England and Wales to bring it into line with that for Scotland?

Lord Borrie: My Lords, I raise a query with regard to Regulation 114 which, as the Minister has explained, allows the full electoral register to be made available for certain crime prevention purposes such as money laundering and crime covered by the Financial Services and Markets Act. I suggest that it is important for the public to fight financial crime in general, including, for example, fraud by cowboy dealers. Is it not a pity that the full electoral register is not available for the prevention of all types of financial crime, as I believe the regulations provided for when they were originally drafted? It may be that there is some concern arising out of the case referred to under the Human Rights Act. That is not easy for some of us to understand. I hope that the Minister will place the Government's legal advice on the matter in the Library.

The Duke of Montrose: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his exposition of the instruments. He said that he expected further regulation to be brought forward under Section 12 of the Scotland Act. I was interested to note that under the Scotland regulations the candidates who are allowed to obtain copies of the register are those involved in European Parliament elections and local government elections. I believe that there is another section on Westminster elections. Does that mean that the use of any register in a Scottish election will be in a local government election?

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Will the candidates be able to gain access to the register, or must a separate register be kept for Scottish elections because access will not be available?

Lord Goodhart: My Lords, I was surprised to discover only a few years ago that electoral registers were on sale to anyone who wanted to buy them. Indeed, I discovered that one could buy a CD-ROM containing all the registers for the whole of the United Kingdom. I then discovered that such sales had been taking place for a long time. However, there can be no doubt that the development of information technology, in particular the publication of electoral registers in electronic form, made it simpler to use them for commercial purposes and therefore more valuable for, say, direct marketing.

It then became apparent that the sale of electoral information gathered under compulsion from people who did not want the information to be used for other purposes was likely to be in breach of both data protection laws and the Human Rights Act. Therefore, in the Representation of the People Act 2000 the Government proposed restrictions on the availability of the full electoral register and at the same time provided for an edited version of the register which could be available for sale generally and which omitted the names of those who wanted to opt out.

That move was strongly opposed by marketing organisations, which wanted continued access to the full register. We supported the Government's proposals to have an edited register and these regulations implement the provisions in the Representation of the People Act providing for separate full and edited registers. We therefore welcome the regulations and regret the delay in introducing them.

It is a little surprising that a new set of regulations was issued in 2001, after the Representation of the People Bill 2000 had been passed, which did not provide for edited registers. I wonder whether it is a little cynical to suggest that the Government were prodded into moving on the matter only by the decision in the case involving Wakefield Metropolitan District Council, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam. That case held that the sale for commercial purposes of the full register was a breach of data protection legislation.

The Electoral Commission has produced an interesting paper recommending that there should be no commercial sales of electoral registers, even if on an edited basis. I have some sympathy with that viewpoint, but the policy was established by the Representation of the People Act two years ago and we cannot and should not revisit that when considering the statutory instruments which implement that Act. That Act provided that electors should be required to opt out rather than required to opt in to the edited register.

The question whether the vetting of applications for credit is a proper ground for access to a full register is, in my view, somewhat uncertain. There is a case for saying that it should be open to an individual to take

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the view that he does not expect to require credit and sees no reason why his name should therefore remain on an edited register. However, it would obviously be necessary to ensure that any instruction form warned people that if they opted out they would be at risk of difficulty if they sought credit which required reference to a credit reference agency.

The paper from the Electoral Commission, while I do not feel able to support its major proposition, raises a number of more limited points which I would like to bring to the attention of the Minister. First, under the regulations as amended, people are allowed to inspect the full register but to take only hand written notes of it. I can see why that is done. However, that could require constant monitoring by electoral registration officers, or their staff, in order to prevent abuse; for instance, someone who produces a hand-held scanner and runs it over the electoral register while officials are out of the room. Do the Government therefore accept that the proposal is potentially burdensome?

Secondly, the Electoral Commission states that the prescribed form of instructions, while mentioning the right to buy the edited register, should specifically refer to direct marketing as a potential use of the edited register. It may well not occur to a person completing the form that it is likely to be used for that purpose. I agree also with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, on the form.

Thirdly, where an applicant for registration makes his application on a non-standard form, the regulations require the electoral registration officer to send to the applicant a request to be told whether or not the applicant wishes to be excluded from the edited register. If the applicant does not apply within 21 days, it is then assumed that he or she does not wish to be excluded. It appears that the application may not therefore be complete until the applicant either replies or until 21 days have elapsed. If so, it seems that the delay caused by this could deprive the applicant of the right to vote if he or she would otherwise have been on the register which was in force at the date of the election. I wonder whether that is the case and, if so, whether anything can be done about it.

In addition to the points raised by the Electoral Commission, we on these Benches have two questions of our own. First, when the full register is supplied for electoral purposes, can it be supplied in a form which will make it electronically possible to identify those who have opted out of the edited register? There are a number of reasons why that might be useful. Some candidates may, for example, prefer to avoid sending direct mail to those who have opted out for fear of irritating them.

Secondly, does the expression "electoral purposes" include referendums? My inspection of the regulations suggests that it probably does not, because a referendum does not involve the election of anyone. I cannot see any wider definition of "electoral purposes" either in these regulations or in the 2001 regulations which they amend. I believe it is plainly desirable that the full register should be made available to those who are contesting referendums so that a right

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to copies should extend to all people who are permitted participants in referendums under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. It may be that the Government believe that the appropriate way of dealing with the matter is by including a power to make such regulations in primary legislation which would be necessary to authorise any future referendum. However, if there is no such provision, plainly a major lacuna would be created.

8.30 p.m.

Lord Kingsland: My Lords, the Register of Electors is a document prepared and maintained by local councils. In essence, the document is produced as a list of persons who are eligible to vote at elections.

Legislation enables commercial organisations to purchase the data and use it for a variety of purposes, such as marketing and credit references. This has been a constant matter of concern to electoral registration officers as, in effect, those persons supplying their details for electoral registration were given no notice that that was the case.

Last November, an individual initiated legal action against an electoral registration officer under the Human Rights Act—the Robertson case—for failing to confirm that his details would not be sold on for commercial gain. The case was upheld in the High Court and since then the provision of information to organisations, other than those involved in elections, has been suspended on the advice of the Electoral Commission.

In May this year, the DTLR published draft regulations to address the situation. In the main the proposals set out a process whereby electors could decide whether or not their details could be sold on for commercial purposes. Effectively, this will provide two electoral registers: one complete list for electoral purposes and another available for commercial purposes. It is also the Government's intention to allow the complete list to be used for credit reference and law enforcement purposes.

The DTLR invited comments on the draft regulations and the Association of Electoral Administrators, along with the Society of Local Authorities Chief Executives and the Electoral Commission, objected strongly to the provisions allowing credit reference companies and commercial organisations to purchase the data. Effectively, the new arrangements will place a responsibility on local councils to prepare a statutory document solely for commercial purposes.

Additional resources will need to be identified and there is a real possibility that the accuracy of the data will be compromised as members of the public learn that information they provide is made available for other purposes. The draft regulations do not address the primary issues of the Robertson case.

The Electoral Commission and others, in commenting on the proposals, made a strong, consistent objection to the commercial aspect. Despite these representations, and many others made by

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individual councils across the country, no account was taken of them and the revised regulations now before the House remain unaltered.

Organisations and council officers with extensive experience of electoral matters devoted considerable time and energy to the consultation process, only to find that their time had been completely wasted. Furthermore, the delay in the government department responsible (now the Lord Chancellor's Office) reacting to a High Court judgment made last November has seriously compromised the annual process of updating the information.

Overall, councils and the appointed electoral registration officers now find themselves in a most precarious position. Hiding behind a process of collecting information for electoral purposes to satisfy commercial activity is wrong and will cause concern among the public.

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