Hmm - I suspect that this could be Used For Evil™



and



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11764157

It actually surfaced yesterday - but was generally unnoticed by the media. Can’t think why.

Any bets that once this is done that it will not be used for other purposes? At first it will be used to get people on the electoral roll, then they will use it to find people claiming single person discount on council tax that they are not entitled to. Then allow the tories to have another bash at a poll tax? Then stop abuses of the school admissions system.

and?


All this data is in the hands of the councils or on other publically available databases

If by doing this they do stop people ripping off the state (so forcing me to pay extra) then good on them

I was (and still am) against the ID scheme as that forced me to register a lot of data in one place for no good reason at a very high cost – if a good reason had been found I would have re-examined my opposition

Yes but the single person discount is abused by many, but the whole council tax scheme is flawed. I am still not convinced that combining the databases will not lead to a decentralised ID database.

This is not good.

Exactly. There's no indication that data is to be shared outside of the government. It's simply being used more efficiently. You might even call it "joined up thinking"; something I wish they'd do more often.

It's absolutely chuffing ridiculous the hoops departments in different councils have to go through at the moment. If someone moves about, surely it makes more sense for their records to be available everywhere rather than have a bunch of civil servants needlessly duplicating work that's already been done.

I'll give you an example. I reported a crime. It happened in London, but I reported it at a station local to my home. After 3 months I went to another station near my office to ask why there was no news. Apparently it takes over 3 months to transfer crime reports from one area to another which is done via printed documents and legal teams at huge expense. This particular station had absolutely no way of accessing the information which may well have been important to them! This was just 18 months ago; not back in the dark ages.

FFS, surely it should just be on a database? Fragmentation is simply inefficient and it's costing YOU money in the consequent bureaucracy. In some cases, it might cost you your life.

Yes but councils are not linked to police forces. Also you did not state which areas were involved. The police operate on a county basis and many people work in different counties and they are not connected. If you report a burglary in Surrey the Hampshire or Kent constabularies are unlikely to know about it.