Poll Tax (Restoration of Individual Privacy) (Hansard, 14 February 1989)

§ Mr. Harry Cohen (Leyton)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Abolition of Domestic Rates Etc. (Scotland) Act 1987 and the Local Government Finance Act 1988 in order to protect an individual's privacy.

The poll tax is the pinnacle of perniciousness under this Tory regime. Some families in my constituency in Leyton will have to pay £1,000 or more a year, and they will go bankrupt. It is, however, the abuse of privacy that I am concerned with today. The title of the Bill speaks for itself. By the time the poll tax is finally introduced, more than £100 million will have been spent to keep tabs on all adults over the age of 18—money which could be much better spent on providing badly needed public services. Instead, millions will be spent on computers and bureaucrats so that local authority officials can invade people's privacy to collect the poll tax.

Valentine's day is a poignant day on which to introduce this Bill. It is a day for lovers. Yet in future, poll tax officers will be entitled to know who lives and sleeps with whom so that they can collect the tax. The implementation of the social security cohabitation rule, under which DHSS officials spy on women claimants' sex lives, will seem but a small fondle compared with the collection methods for the poll tax, which will be an orgasm of privacy abuse. Today is also the day of the Valentine's day massacre, but on this occasion it is our privacy rights that are being massacred by the poll tax.

The Guardian of 4 October last year had the following to say: Couples face policing by poll tax rules. Local council finance officers"— that is, poll tax officers— will be expected to play policeman to force deserted spouses to pay their errant partner's poll tax, according to draft Environment Department guidelines. They will also have to decide whether people sharing a house are living as man and wife and are therefore liable for each others tax and whether couples have separated. … Joint and several liability for poll tax applies not only to married couples but also to couples living together as man and wife … In general … where a husband leaves the matrimonial home without paying his poll tax, officials should resist the 'administratively more straightforward' course of forcing the deserted wife to pay. They should try to trace the husband. However if they fail—and the Environment Department thinks that will not happen often"— who are they kidding?— then the officers may force the wife to pay, perhaps by seizing the video or deducting the debt from her earnings. The authorities are to hound and punish women on their own in their own homes for the faults of their partners. Under the Government's poll tax proposals, everyone is to be tagged, tabulated and taxed. Individual privacy has been cast aside as of no value and its loss—in addition to the poll tax itself—is a price that everybody will have to pay. The Government are not too bothered because privacy, like the quality of life, is not easily measured in pounds sterling. The poll tax will be a snooper's charter. Many private bailiff companies are already eager to act as bounty hunters, and councils such as big-pay-off Westminster prepared to hire them.

The purpose of my Bill is to highlight the ways in which privacy is eroded by the poll tax. It also attempts to protect 163 poll tax data in law at least to the same extent as the census. Each clause restricts the invasion of privacy that will occur with the poll tax. The detailed provisions are as follows.

Clause 1 ensures that personal data can be used or collected only if it is fully in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1984. The exceptions to that Act granted to poll tax officers are removed. Under my Bill, personal data must be obtained fairly and lawfully and poll tax officers must not mislead people as to why the information is required. Disclosure from the poll tax registeres will be subject to the control exercised by the data protection registrar. Then, at least, he will be able to take up complaints from the public about the misuse of information originally obtained for poll tax purposes.

Clause 2, for Scotland, and clause 3, for England and Wales, provide that public inspection of the extract of the register must be for a purpose associated with the poll tax and not for any other purpose such as debt collecting, direct mailing—that is, junk mail—policing and purposes of that kind. In Scotland, anybody can inspect the register or an extract from the register for any purpose. Such unfettered access is an abuse of individual rights, making individuals subject in future to commercial and authoritarian exploitation.

Clause 4 states that information about an individual held for poll tax purposes can he disclosed by a poll tax officer only for a purpose associated with the poll tax and with the consent of the individual. It prevents poll tax registers from being a source of information for other organisations which should have no right to that information on individuals.

Clauses 5 and 6 go together. Clause 5 makes it an offence for any person or organisation to hold or process personal data from more than one poll tax register unless the individual concerned has consented. This stops registers being merged or combined and thus prevents their being used to keep track of the movements of individuals or being used in a wider population database.

Clause 6 also places a restriction on collection of the date of birth, so that it is legitimately obtained only where two or more people with the same name live at the same address. That is important because, when people are vetted, their date of birth is required. Without the date of birth, the register is unattractive as a starting point for black lists, credit references and general vetting registers, for which it otherwise would be used. In Scotland it is already possible to combine poll tax registers and, through the use of the date of birth, develop unique personal identifiers in a database that would include the whole adult population of Scotland. That is an intolerable situation, but it is quite legal under the current poll tax law.

Clause 7 removes the Secretary of State's power to breach a duty of confidentiality and disclose any 164 information for poll tax purposes. Any disclosure by him would then be subject to the Data Protection Act, as it should be. At the moment, social services Ministers have the power to blurt out almost anything they like if it help in the collection of the poll tax. No at-risk person will be safe from a Minister more interested in collecting the poll tax than in protecting a social services case.

Also in relation to the social services connection, clause 8 allows any local authority to refuse to provide information to the poll tax officer if that authority is satisfied that the disclosure would seriously undermine the services that it provides to an individual. That is not the case with regard to the poll tax at present.

Under clause 9, the electoral registrar can use the poll tax register to encourage people to vote. However, if the electoral registrar uses the poll tax register, the right to sell the electoral register ceases under my Bill, and the electoral register can be inspected only for electoral purposes. Although the Government have stopped the sale of the poll tax register, the current law allows the poll tax register to be copied by the electoral registrar and the information placed on the electoral register and then sold to all the marketeers, vetters and black-listers who want it. That is a ludicrous situation.

Finally, clause 10 gets the name right, so that it is the more common usage "poll tax" rather than the ridiculously misleading misnomer "community charge". Ministers answering parliamentary questions are currently saying that they are not introducing a poll tax. That is ridiculous. Of course they are doing so—and they will riot fool the public by denying that they are and using another name.

The poll tax has both commercial and police state potential, and under the present Government privacy comes a poor third to both. Abuses will certainly occur. In the final analysis, if individual privacy rights are to be properly maintained, the poll tax must be abolished. 1 hope to support a Labour Government that will do just that.