Population Registers: Some Administrative and Statistical Pros and Cons

The Registrar General of 70 years ago recommended that a central population register should co‐ordinate a variety of administrative records of persons. The aims would be to identify each person accurately and so ensure that obligations and rights were correctly assigned to citizens, and to provide better statistics. His vision has become a reality in the Nordic countries and to a major degree in the Benelux coutries too. All have regular and reliable population statistics and in the Nordic countries the censuses of population are based in whole or in part on data from registers. Meanwhile in the UK records of persons remain unco‐ordinated and ramshackle. The Community Charge registers to be created in Britain serve a single purpose and have serious flaws in their design. The climate in the UK is at present hostile to the introduction of an effective multipurpose register on Nordic lines. The paper discusses the pros and cons of such a register which raise issues concerning justice, fairness, freedom, privacy, efficiency, the fight against crime and fraud, and relations between the government and the community.