I’ve written about the inherent difficulties in identifying individuals or even individual properties from a practitioner perspective across multiple UK government computer systems before. Having been involved in the National Land & Property Gazetteer (NLPG) exercise from the outset I am aware that even with a standard for recognising, labelling and addressing static structures such as houses there are issues that can take a long time to settle. When we are considering trying to fix individuals, without the benefit of an identity card or similar compulsory marking system, this is going to be very hard – and the LLPG/NLPG saga has been going on for more than a decade and still isn’t perfect!
There is a vision within UK central government to move to a system of individual electoral registration. Currently one individual with a property is expected to take responsiblity for ensuring that all those eligible to vote within those premises are put on the Electoral Register, a very people-intensive process where forms are delivered to every known residence within each local authority area. These are then repeatedly chased for completion as a part of ensuring that the Register is up-to-date.
On 4 November 2011 the UK Parliamentary Political and Constitutional Reform Committee issued its Tenth Report on the topic of Individual Electoral Registration and Electoral Administration. A number of conclusions are reported and amongst these were ‘Data matching can only be a success if local authorities are provided with the information they need in a timely and helpful way’. However, the general approach towards any sort of compulsion with regards to registering remains highly relaxed.
Whilst various legal requirements are in place for local authorities to hold address data, these still lack a level of consistency across the approaches, which all adds to the cost of managing computer systems and their interfaces. It had been hoped that the requirement for one LLPG would standardise this, however whilst legislation requires systems to hold addresses for Council Tax, Business Rates (NNDR), Elections, Environmental Health, Social Services etc etc these are all likely to be provided by different software companies, and whilst the Unique Property Reference Number may provide a link between them, once they are all matched, doing that work in the first place requires effort that cannot be afforded in these hard times. This all complicated by the base legislation where different individuals and different addresses have potentially different status within their respective laws.
This will be further confused by the divergent projects across government relying upon individual identity management with little apparent programme management to ensure they don’t do their own thing. The anti-ID card lobby have little to fear whilst personal identity applications will continue to breed and the £10 million promised by Francis Maude will not go far.
Posted by greatemancipator 
The Great E-mancipator 