Why should opting out of double-glazing direct mail stop you hearing about a local planning application?

Use of the electoral register is, quite rightly, tightly controlled. The full register can only be used for running elections and a very small number of other tasks, such as if the police want to use it to help track down a person. As a database of names and addresses is also useful for a wide range of other purposes there is an ‘edited’ version of the electoral register which anybody can buy – but which anyone can also opt out from appearing on.

However, by having just the one type of register available for wider use all sorts of different uses are lumped in together. If a local council wants to write individually addressed letters to people in an area about a forthcoming planning application (particularly sensible in an area of flats behind intercoms), the planning team can only use the edited register. But that’s the same edited register which is used by double-glazing firms to send you letters touting new windows.

If you want to opt out of receiving those sorts of commercial mailshots but get public sector information then tough. It’s all or nothing.

In fact, the situation is even worse than that because, knowing that they can only use the same version of the register as the commercial marketing firms, many parts of the public sector don’t even try directly addressed communications (knowing how many people they will miss) and instead use blunderbuss blanket communications. That may be the best they can do under the rules, but do the rules really make sense?

I am happy with the principle that the electoral register should be used for elections and not much else. The answer though is a simple one: it is to have two types of edited register – one for public-sector use and one for wider use.

People should be able to opt out of one or both or neither as they wish, but by creating the two it will open up new possibilities for the public sector to communicate directly with people – efficiently and effectively direct to the right people. Getting information about health or education is very different from getting the prices of the latest in treble glazing. Perhaps you disagree, in which case fine – you can opt out of both or neither as you wish. But people shouldn’t be forced to view them as the same.

I blogged last year about a government consultation on the future of the edited register and the deadline for responses to that consultation is coming up (23 February).

So you can guess what I’ve written, and if you agree – why not fill in and email off the simple form too? [Consultation now closed and removed from the web.]