ABSTRACT
To meet the demand for population data while suffering under the austerity cuts imposed by Rayner, the government’s data collectors turned to an increased use of what systems and datasets were already at their disposal. The first section of this chapter highlights how this led to plans to repurpose the electoral register. The second section of this chapter looks at the registers that were at the centre of the poll tax (the community charge), a flagship policy introduced by the Thatcher government in 1987. Both the electoral and the poll-tax registers reflected a long-standing characteristic of Britishness in that both were held locally, rather than centrally, and these two sections of this chapter examine how the centralisation inherent in the data turn impacted on this localism. The third section shows how these governments continued to try to make more thorough use of the data already held in Whitehall’s disparate filing systems. This demonstrates how government pursued a variety of schemes to link datasets through common numbering systems.
