Voting No on DM: U.K. DMA fights cutoff of electoral register data
A rear-guard action by the United Kingdom’s Direct Marketing Association may still soften the severest blow yet dealt to the industry’s access to consumer data. A last-minute amendment tabled in the House of Lords on Feb. 14 sought to delay legislation that would remove the register of voters from the public domain.
“We have one final chance,” says Colin Fricker, director of government and legal affairs at the DMA. But he admits that “it’s like knocking your head against a brick wall.” The amendment is seeking a six-month moratorium on the ban on using voters’ names and addresses for direct marketing purposes after the new bill becomes law in November.
The issue rose out of a Home Office working party set up in January 1998 to look into the process of electoral registration. Initially charged with examining ways of making it easier for consumers to register to vote, the group soon began to consider the commercial availability of the register.
In the United Kingdom, the list of voters is the only source of universal information on every adult. It is central to the credit referencing industry and is extensively used in DM for data verification, as well as sourcing cold mailing lists. This has caused some parties to connect a fall in the number of voters registered with a desire not to be mailed.
According to research carried out by the Data Protection Registrar in July 1999, 86% of consumers say they are concerned about the commercial availability of their name and address. The Registrar, Elizabeth France, claimed: “This clearly reinforces the view that people believe they go on the electoral register so they can vote and not to provide an easily available source of data for credit referencing, research and [direct mailings].”
But Fricker dismisses this interpretation. “There is no correlation between marketing and direct mail usage and non-registration,” he says. But two issues have fueled the speed with which the new legislation has been drafted.
The first has been the availability of access to the list via an Internet site that allows users to search against any name or phone number. This has been linked in the popular press to the murder of a TV presenter, whose address was discovered through this Web site.
More significantly, the Labour government is widely believed to be planning an early general election in 2001. It wants to trial new voting methods in local elections first, before the national vote. Intensive lobbying by the DMA and other business interests has already wrung one major concession, however. Credit referencing agencies will still be able to refer to the list.
According to Fricker, this sets a precedent. “How is it compatible to allow it for credit and not for validating data that’s been lawfully obtained by direct marketers?” he asks. DMers had to accept that they can’t use the register to source mailing lists. But whether this will be sufficient to buy back other uses depends more on political expediency than on commercial sense.
