COMMUNITY CHARGES REGISTER (Hansard, 4 March 1987)

§ Mr. Home Robertson
I beg to move amendment No. 69, in page 13, line 13, leave out from beginning to end of line 15 and insert— '(1) There shall be two community charges registers for each registration area. The public register shall specify.'.

Mr. Deputy Speaker
With this it will be convenient to take the following : Government amendment No. 70.
Amendment No. 71, in page 13, line 38, at end insert 'The private register shall specify such other matters as may be prescribed.'. Amendment No. 72, in page 13, line 39, leave out paragraph (e).

§ Mr. Home Robertson
This proposal would provide for two separate sets of information for the poll tax register. There will inevitably be a mass of peripheral information associated with the register, some of which should be treated as confidential. The sort of points I have in mind are whether a person has a second house or another address, whether someone is a student, whether someone is in hospital, whether someone is in prison and, indeed, the date of birth of the person concerned. That is not the sort of material one would want to see on a publicly available register. It would be useful if the Minister could acknowledge that such peripheral information could be maintained as confidential information.
Included in this group of amendments is the Government's intriguing amendment No. 70 which states : Page 13, line 34 [Clause 15], at end insert— '(d) in relation to each natural person registered in the register, his date of birth;'. I would be grateful if the Minister can take this opportunity to say what is meant by a "natural person" 1000 and whether there are any unnatural persons in Scotland for the purposes of this legislation or anything else. Will he also say if, whether they are natural or not, he would want their birthdays to appear on the public register?

§ Mr. Lang
The hon. Member for East Lothian (Mr. Home Robertson) was right to say that there are some details relating to the entries in the register which are confidential and which it would not be desirable to disclose. His approach to the matter is somewhat different from the Government's.
These amendments appear to be designed to establish what registration details for community charge purposes should be made public and what should not. These matters are dealt with in clause 22 rather than in this clause. I must first explain that, while we accept that some parts of the register should be open to public inspection and others should not, we consider that it would be an unduly inflexible approach to specify that there should be two separate registers. Instead, the approach embodied in clause 22 allows for a single register which is available for inspection to different degrees depending on the need and desirability for different categories of people to have access to different parts of the register. We envisage that the names and addresses contained in the register should be available for public inspection. That is right, since it is in the general public interest that a public record should be available for all those who are liable to pay any of the community charges : for the same reasons, the valuation roll is at present open to public inspection.
These amendments would, however, extend the scope of the public register by allowing it to reveal also which of the community charges was payable by each person, and the date of each person's liability. We do not consider that it is necessary for these details to be publicly available. It would, indeed, be positively dangerous for details of which community charge was payable by each person to be publicly available, since that would allow anyone to establish clearly where a standard community charge was payable, and, therefore, where houses could be found which were likely to be empty for considerable periods. That would come very close to being a burglars' charter, and for that reason, if for no other, we cannot support the amendments.
The contents of the register which we envisage being prescribed under paragraph (e) of subsection (1) includes such points as whether a person is a student for the purposes of clause 10(4) and (5), and whether child benefit is payable in respect of any person listed in the register. We shall be considering in due course, in consultation with local authority interests, what other details need to be specified in the register. But we are clear that the power of prescription will not be used to add further details which will be publicly available. Clause 22(2)(a) clearly sets out the restriction on the public availability of information, and the power of prescription will not be able to change that.
Amendment No. 70 stems from further consideration of the requirements for the detailed content of the register. In this we have been assisted by the views of local authority practitioners as expressed through the Rating and Valuation Associations rating forum.
It has been pointed out to us that in order to assist the identification of individuals it would be desirable for the register to record in all cases the date of birth of people who are liable to pay any of the community charges. In the 1001 simplest instance, this would allow people at one address who shared the same name to be clearly distinguished. For instance, there might be three John McTaggarts, father, son and grandson, at a single address and for billing and collection purposes it should be made clear which is which. The information would also be useful to check the identity of a person when he moves from one local authority area to another, otherwise it would be difficult for the registration officer in the new area to be sure that the John McTaggart who was recorded as having arrived in the area—