Back in 2009 I speculated that the plan for a centralised version of the country’s electoral registers (the CORE project) should win a prize for worst government IT project:
Back in early 2001 I sat in a consultation meeting where the project was being planned, with the data available on CD (ah! those were the days) and then securely online in early 2002 …
One of my favourite memories of this whole saga was when both the Electoral Commission and the Government in fairly quick succession carried out a consultation that went over pretty much the same ground. As a result, I was twice interviewed on the subject, being asked very similar questions each time – by the very same person, who happened to have changed jobs between the two in between the two interviews!
The other favourite memory will be discovering that the Government was fighting the Information Commission for the rights to shred the record of one of my interviews:
The idea, too, that what I said in an interview is so sensitive that it has to be exempted from Freedom of Information requests and the interview notes destroyed makes the interview sound far more interesting than it was. I doubt any terrorist would benefit from knowing my views on the merits of BS7666 and how BFPO addresses should be handled. (Perhaps if you read my words backwards in French a mysterious message revealing the keys to the nation’s nuclear deterrent emerges?)
But the serious point is that huge amounts of time (and hence money) has been spent on getting not very far over the years.
So this is excellent news:
Plans to create an expensive database of electors are to be abandoned saving taxpayers more than £11m, the Government has announced …
The Government will work with the Electoral Commission and others to consider other, less costly, ways to improve the provision of electoral registration information.
Scrapping is the right decision, even though some of the original motivations behind the project were good ones. Those involved in checking whether or not donations to parties or candidates are legally permissible would have found the job easier and more accurate had the database ever made it to a successful launch, for example. In the end, however, those potential gains were far too small compared to the long-running, money-eating project that was going nowhere, slowly.
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4 Comments
it is good news that an expensive and unnecessary IT system is being abandoned. Any wasteful and unnecessary bureaucracy should be scrapped.
There is a lot wrong with the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000.
At the moment quite small donations have to be disclosed and reported publicly on the Electoral Commission’s website. This means a great deal of pointless unnecessary work by unpaid local party treasurers, to satisfy the idle curiosity of those few people who have nothing better to do than look at the information provided.
It should not be relevant when selecting candidates to check how much they have been giving to the party. Candidates should be selected irrespective of personal fortune. Private information of this kind should not have to be made public, It offends the principle of the Data Protection Act 1998 that sensitive personal data regarding a person’s political affiliations should not be publicised.
Giving a donation to a political party is not in itself a corrupt act, any more than giving a donation to any other charitable or benevolent association. It the donation is intended to buy favours, this is corruption. There are laws against corruption. A law saying all payments which are not bribes must be disclosed is pretty useless. Criminals do not tend to obey such laws.
At the moment a treasurer who receives a donation from someone living in a different district has to go to the town hall in that district during working hours to check the full register.
Neither the Electoral Commission nor local councils will generally help the treasurer by giving out information by telephone, which ironically is ‘because of data protection’.
While PPERA remains in force, copies of the full register should be made available for noting (but not copying) at public libraries and treasurers must be given the right to obtain the information which they are required to disclose.
Perhaps Labour would have us believe they were driven to set up this project by a sense of idealism (many would suggest darker motives for a national database) but the incompetence demonstrated by this huge waste is staggering.
For goodness sake, it didn’t ever need to be much more than a name and address list. Surely to goodness they could have got most of the benefits they sought – and in the process made life easier for everyone who uses the data – by consulting on a standard format for data interchange and then specifying one. Or even just publishing a spec – like the good old British Standards. It isn’t difficult and would hardly have cost any money at all. Perhaps the failure was to be overly consultative on such a trivial thing?
Personally I find it hard to believe anyone could be so foolishly wasteful of public resources for such small ambitions so I must conclude that indeed Labour’s aims must have been much deeper, and unspoken.
Labour went for the diamond standard and what we’ve ended up with is less use than coal dust …
Is it not ironic then that the party is in the process of establishing a national electoral register database! I hope it’s cheaper and more successful.
CORE (or something like it) is essential if we want to get eVoting off the ground. It would also provide the means to verify European Citizens Initiatives (required by the Lisbon Treaty) and help with understanding the validity of ePetitions.
Is it narrow-minded, therefore, that the LibDems should propose a return to eVoting and bolstering of ePetitions in their recent policy review on technology issues yet cheer the withdrawl the enabling technology?