My Lords, this is not a subject on which I would often speak, but I have thought a great deal about the inconsistencies in our practice: having data protection legislation and yet an electoral register where you can opt-out of the publication of your address.
The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is right—there are too many people who have an interest in having access to this information for good purposes, by and large. If this were on an opt-in basis, have the Government done anything to obtain a picture of how many people would be likely to opt in. I imagine that the value of the register would be wholly destroyed. We know how many people have learnt in the age of the internet never to tick any of the boxes that state that you are willing to receive any further information for any purpose, even a worthy purpose.
I have a feeling that we are on the cusp between information that has to be public and information that our clunky data protection legislation regards as private. It is incoherent. We have ended up regarding home addresses in some contexts as personal information that is not to be transmitted or disclosed to others
without express permission, and regarding them in other cases as public information that is non-personal and that may be published. It is not so much the purposes that concern me, whether they are commercial or not; it is that ultimately the opt-in register might be radically incomplete and not useful for many purposes.