Jim Dobbin MP supports edited register campaign

Jim Dobbin MP

MP for Heywood and Middleton Jim Dobbin is supporting a national campaign to save the edited register.

The publicly available electoral register is used for a wide variety of reasons by charities, businesses and individuals.

Most notably, it is used in tracing thousands of missing persons each year and reunites them with their friends and family, to enable adoption organisations to find biological parents of adoptive children, by businesses to provide age verification, by businesses reduce to credit card fraud, to minimise identity theft, to pursue bad debts to repatriate dormant financial assets to their rightful owners, and support probate.

The government is currently reviewing responses to a consultation on whether to abolish or significantly restrict the edited register.

Jim Dobbin MP signed an Early Day Motion, a way for MPs to raise an issue in Parliament, supporting the continued availability of the register.

Mr Dobbin said: “The edited register is an incredibly important resource for business and charities, as well as for individuals. Given the economic and socially damaging consequences of abolishing the edited register there need to be compelling evidence to support restricting its use.

“It is therefore very important that the register remains publicly available.”