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Home Office

Answer

Miss Widdecombe: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will list the interim solutions considered by his Department on access to the electoral register together with his estimate of the cost of each solution and the reasons why each solution would not provide value for money; and if he will make a statement. [141479] Mr. Mike O'Brien: We considered one interim solution put forward by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA). This would have involved registration officers sending their registers (together with the monthly updates under rolling registration) to a contractor who would create and maintain a central electronic register. A second contractor would then have provided access to the data to political parties and the Electoral Commission via a secure intranet or internet route. The key difference between this approach and the proposed permanent solution is that under the permanent arrangement access would be to the locally held registers, obviating the need to send copies to a central point and thereby ensuring the data are always up to date. The estimated cost of this interim solution was £440,000 a considerable sum for a solution with only a limited shelf-life. This proposed interim solution would have been a considerable IT project in its own right with all the attendant risk. In particular, there was no certainty that the necessary contractual arrangements could be made, the technical issues resolved and the data supplied in time to enable the arrangement to run from February.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

359 c59-60W;359 c57-8W; 141479

Session

2000-01

Subjects

Access Disclosure of information Costs Electoral register

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk