Electoral Administration Bill

Any information that goes alongside the name and address of a person claiming child tax credit should of course remain confidential and none of it should be shared with anyone. Before any such changes took place, we would need to ensure that people who put themselves on any of the registers about which we are talking were aware that basic information about their names and addresses could well be used for electoral registration purposes. It goes without saying that we would need to consult the data registrar to ensure that we were not falling foul of any of the many provisions that exist to protect an individual’s anonymity. I would certainly not want this or any other Bill to tamper with such necessary protections. However, given all the different data sources that we have, surely we can find appropriate sources through which we would not fall foul of such provisions and that would give electoral registration officers the targeted information that they need.