Debt collectors press for access to electoral roll

Posted in 'Dealing with Debt' by Barry Stamp

07 December 2011

Debt collectors are urging the government to retain their ability to access the electoral roll to help them to trace absconders, skips and ‘gone away’ debtors, who add a significant element to the cost of credit for the majority of paying consumers.

Peter Wallbrook, the Chief Executive Officer of the CSA, believes that the abolition of the edited register – the version of the electoral roll that is sold by local authorities mostly to marketing companies – would have ‘very serious consequences for the UK economy’. Writing in Credit Collections and Risk, the official magazine of the Association of Credit Professionals, he expresses deep concern that the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee’s report of session 2010-2012 again repeated its recommendation for the complete abolition of the edited register, adding that this would make the tracing of debtors almost impossible and much more expensive, the costs of which would inevitably have to be met by consumers.

There is no doubt that the electoral roll helps to trace debtors, but one of the most powerful sources of new addresses is the account information supplied by lenders to the credit reference agencies. Because these are updated monthly, they are usually much more efficient at finding new addresses than the electoral roll, which is updated fully only once a year.

To find out what addresses are held against you on your credit reports, you should obtain a Multi Agency Credit Report from Checkmyfile. This is the most comprehensive resource available to consumers to examine the extent of data held about them. It’s free to trial for the first 30 days, then costs only £9.99 per month – cancel anytime – and meantime get more than twice the information than any other credit report.