The sale of electoral register was first properly reviewed in 1998. The Working Party on Electoral Procedures made several recommendations, one of which was to allow voters to opt out of the use of their personal details for non-electoral purposes. In other words, there would be two versions of the electoral roll: a full register containing the personal details of everyone registered to vote and an edited register which omits the details of voters who had opted out.

The consultation

The working party had organised a public consultation on the sale of the electoral register. The case for banning the sale of the register for non-electoral purposes was made by Elizabeth France, the Data Protection Registar (nowadays known as the Information Commissioner):

The way in which individuals have to supply their names, addresses and, in some cases dates of birth, once a year, on penalty of a criminal conviction, for whatever purpose someone might choose to purchase them for, from an ERO is out of step with current Data Protection practice and law.

France essentially pointed out the obvious: selling voters' personal details was incompatible with the Data Protect Act 1998. At the same time she acknowledged there was the possibility that the register might be sold for purposes where the public interest in having a complete set overrides individual preference. In other words, there is a case to be made for using the electoral register for, say, the prevention of crime. However, the compilation of direct marketing lists was not such a public interest.

On the other side of the argument were advertising companies, credit reference agencies and an animal charity. I have found just one response in full, from the Advertising Association. They said the direct marketing industry uses the electoral register for data verification, credit screening and as a data source, and that the damage to their businesses of the withdrawal from sale of the electoral register would be immeasurable. They went on to argue that the commercial use of the register benefits everyone, including consumers, and that there is no evidence to suggest that sale of voters' personal details is a significant factor in dissuading people from registering to vote. If you are interested, there is a summary of the type of responses the working party received from the industry in Annex M of its final report.

The recommendation

The working party's final report briefly touched on how the electoral roll was commoditised. They noted that very few businesses purchase the electoral register directly. Instead, third parties bought consumer data from two major credit reference agencies, who used the register as the source of "consumer databases":

We have noted, and do not doubt, that the register has come to provide an integral part of the financial and direct marketing commercial armouries. However we also note that very few businesses purchase the register direct. Rather, most non-electoral uses are sourced from copies of the register provided by the two main consumer credit reference agencies, Experian and Equifax, both of which integrate registration data with other databases to add value to the information they provide.

This of course added to the concerns about privacy. The electoral register was no longer, as it had been in the 1960s, a cheap and convenient source of address labels. It was now the primary building block of enormous lifestyle databases. Plus, companies such as 192.com (remember them?) had just started publishing everyone's name, address on the world wide web. There were now entire industries that had been built around the sale of voters' personal data.

The same paragraph in the working party's report went on to say that Experian and Equifax had accepted they could obtain personal data from other sources. The problem, though, would be cost: building lifestyle databases would become much more expensive. Ultimately, the working party concluded that giving voters the choice to opt out would be a compromise between privacy concerns and business interests.

In the process, the privacy concerns were reduced to the question whether or not the sale of voters' personal details discourages people from registering to vote. The working party concluded that there was no evidence to support the claim. That is probably a fair conclusion, though, as we shall see later, a study from 2013 concluded that the vast majority of voters resent the selling of their name and address. The practice may not dissuade people from registering to vote but it certainly doesn't do anything to increase registration numbers either.

Parliamentary debates

The recommendation to create an edited register was accepted. Section 9 of the Representation of the People Act 2000 ("Restrictions on supply of information contained in register") stated that registration officers are required to prepare a version of the register which omits the names and addresses of registered electors by or on behalf of whom requests have been made to have their names and addresses excluded from that version of it (“the edited register”). The section also required officers to explain the difference between the two registers. The latter requirement would be revisited in 2013, as the government felt electoral registration office weren't doing enough to persuade voters not to opt out. They tackled that "problem" by introducing a statutory sales pitch description of the for-sale register. But I am getting ahead of myself — I will get back to the propaganda on electoral registration forms when discussing the open register.

The Working Party's recommendations were first debated in November 1999. The Home Secretary said the government was conscious that the commercial use of the electoral register wasn't limited to just annoying junk mailers and that some other commercial uses of the full register could be allowed:

As the law stands, anyone may buy a copy of the electoral register for any purpose. The Home Office and electoral administrators receive more complaints about that than any other subject. People are unhappy about the large amount of unsolicited mail — junk mail — from companies that have obtained their details from the electoral register.

Perhaps more worryingly, the advent of powerful CD-Roms compiled from the electoral register, which allow for searching by name, means for example that abusive spouses can trace their former partners with considerable ease using a single CD-Rom. People who feel threatened in that way may simply not dare to register.

All of that, together with the requirements of the European Union data protection directive, which was signed and agreed by the previous Administration and, generally, of the right to privacy, led the working party to conclude that it was wrong that people should be under a statutory obligation to provide their details for electoral registration purposes and then have no say about whether that information could be used for other unrelated purposes.

The working party recommended that there should be a box on the electoral registration form and people should be given the right to opt out of having their names included in the register that is for sale. In effect, there would be two versions of the register: a full one, which could be used for electoral purposes and would also be available for law enforcement purposes; and, an edited version, which would be for sale and would contain only the names of those who had not opted to be excluded from it. Clause 9 allows for regulations for that purpose to be made.

At the same time, we are conscious that the banking and finance industries make extensive use of the electoral register for money laundering and identity checks and that it is also an important factor in deciding who should be granted credit. In drawing up the regulations, we shall clearly need to balance the needs of those industries with privacy and data protection concerns.

I can, of course, assure the House that a full regulatory impact assessment will be made to accompany those regulations. We will also be able to discuss that in more detail in Committee.

There was fierce opposition against restricting the sale of the register. Credit reference agencies and, to a lesser extent, debt recovery agencies were a particularly thorny issue. These industries used the electoral roll extensively and claimed that, without having access to the full register, people who opt out to reduce junk mail might find it difficult to get credit. The Conservative MP John Greenway demanded an exception for these companies:

On the interests of constituents, there is no question but that restricted availability of the list would be damaging for credit reference purposes. It appears that the Government acknowledge that, but they seem unpersuaded that there is a legitimate use for the register in debt recovery. That seems to us an illogical distinction. It will have the same consequence for credit availability because if organisations such as banks are not able to use the electoral register to trace the whereabouts of people to whom credit has been extended, they will be reluctant to extend credit to those people in the first place. If the efficiency of debt recovery is impeded, that will have a clear consequence not only for credit availability but, in the long run, for the cost of credit.

Mr Greenway, who declared his interest with the Institute of Sales Promotions, opposed the creation of an edited register full stop. He had met with the Direct Marketing Association and they had dreamt up an alternative: voters needed to be sent a leaflet, produced and paid for by the industry, that explains why they should not opt out:

The direct marketing industry will not be able to use the register to edit the data that it has obtained from other sources — that process controls the amount of unsolicited mail that consumers receive — but will send more unsolicited mail under a scatter-gun approach until it recognises that that is not a profitable way forward. It will then cease to use direct mail at all. That will have a serious impact on postal services.

…

Industry has proposed an alternative scheme with which the Minister is familiar because representatives of the Direct Marketing Association, the CBI and the Advertising Association have described it to him. It suggests that there should be no opt-out box, but that a leaflet should be prepared at industry's expense to explain all the uses to which the register might be put. That might include direct mail, financial services and its use by credit reference agencies, which is a major factor that the Government have considered.

We welcome the intimation in the letters that the Minister has sent out in the past couple of days — I presume that he will refer to them later — that the Government are persuaded that there is a legitimate credit referencing use that they would wish to continue. They have already agreed that the money laundering use could also continue. All those points could be explained in a leaflet, and the widespread and legitimate use of the register by charities and Government Departments could also continue.

The leaflet would also point out that the raw material in the electoral list would not be used as the sole basis for sending direct mail or making any contact with an individual, but would be used purely to enable those with existing mailing lists to validate the names on the lists. In other words, they would clean their lists to save unnecessary costs and to prevent individuals from receiving unsolicited mail — and those who have moved into a new house from being bombarded with unsolicited mail to former occupants. The industry recognises that that is a nuisance.

Cleaning up junk mail lists

The last paragraph is interesting. The DMA made the argument that the electoral register was used purely to clean up mailing lists, and not as the source of mailing lists. Junk mailers might buy a mailing lists somewhere else and then use the electoral register to verify if the names and addresses on the list are correct. In other words, the argument is that the industry's use of the electoral actually prevents unwanted mailings, and that is what needed to be explained — in a leaflet — to junk mail haters. Exactly how this would work wasn't made clear, though Mr Greenway did give some details:

Under the industry's alternative scheme the leaflet would be paid for by industry and distributed by local authorities at a cost to be borne by industry. The scheme would include a freepost system for individuals who wanted an element of privacy or restriction on the use of the electoral register, particularly to prevent its use as raw data, which would involve the register being used as the sole source of information that an organisation would act upon.

The element of privacy or restriction probably refers to the Mailing Preference Service. Mr Greenway seemed to be unaware that the opt-out scheme has a very limited scope; only members of Direct Marketing Association are required to use the suppression file. Richard Allen (Liberal Democrats) did appear to be aware of this and suggested that the use of the Mailing Preference Service should become a legal requirement, in the same way that telemarketers are required by law to screen numbers against the Telephone Preference Service. Curiously, he also seemed to think that opt-out services such as the TPS and MPS allow people to pick and choose what type of unsolicited marketing they do and don't want to receive:

We are worried that the proposed opt-out will be widely misunderstood by the public and that people will believe that they are opting out of junk mail. The right way of doing that is through services such as a Mailing Preference Service. There should be a system — similar to the current Telephone and Fax Preference Services — whereby people can state that they do not wish to receive a specific sort of mailing. Preventing the circulation of the electoral register will not stop junk mail. We need a system whereby people who carry out direct marketing license themselves and are required to check the names of individuals who have chosen not to receive such material.

Regardless of exactly what was being proposed, the suggestion that opting out does not stop junk mail is plain wrong. There is no evidence to suggest that the electoral register wasn't being used as the source of junk mail lists. The electoral register has become much less valuable for junk mailers than it was in the year 2000, mostly because the majority of voters nowadays choose to opt out. However, in 2000 the electoral roll was still widely used as the source of mailing lists — the evidence the Advertising Association submitted to the Working Party on Electoral Procedures confirmed that. And the electoral roll would remain the primary source for junk mail databases for quite a few years. An industry report from 2006, for instance, states that the register was the most common source of mailing lists. The same report mentions that over a quarter or "direct marketers" had no idea about the origins of their mailing list. That tells you something about how diligent the industry was when it came to processing personal data.

The alternative that was put forward didn't make much sense and never had any chance of success. Several MPs mentioned that people were sick and tired of junk mail and that they were disgusted that junk mail companies got their name and address from the electoral register. Not one MP talked about constituents complaining about incorrectly addressed junk mail. They were complaining about junk mail sent to them — not junk mail sent to a previous occupant. It is also worth pointing out that Mr Greenwood actually argued that without the electoral register advertising mail would be become so poorly targeted that it would kill off the entire industry. That can only be true if the electoral register is used as a junk mail list or if third party lists that need to be cleaned up using the edited register are hopelessly out of date. Again, that tells you something about how junk mail was targeted in the late nineties and early noughties.

At the same time I also don't have much sympathy with the MPs who argued that the use of the electoral register as a junk mail list was discouraging people from registering to vote. There are no hard facts to support the claim and it seems unlikely there are many people who disenfranchise themselves and risk a £1k fine just to reduce junk mail. More importantly, it was a moot point. It was abundantly clear that a significant number of people objected to use of the electoral roll as a junk mail list and that the practice was incompatible with the Data Protection Act 1998.

Ultimately, the main question for our political overlords was how to deal with credit and debt recovery agencies. Some, such as Lord Campbell of Alloway (Conservative), wanted to get rid off Clause 9 altogether and simply use the electoral register for electoral purposes only. Others, such as Lord Borrie, repeated what the Direct Marketing Association had told them; that the electoral register is mainly used to remove people from third party lists and that the clause could put severe restraints on a form of trading which is competitive, well regulated and, most important of all, is found to be extremely convenient and helpful to millions of our fellow citizens.

The debates were largely irrelevant though. A voter who had objected to the sale of his name and address had gone to the High Court, and the judge agreed with the complainant. There was simply no way junk mailers could continue to use the full electoral register to, ahum, "clean" their junk mail lists.