Doreen,
I posted this on another forum - no responses as yet.
----------------------------------------------
Thinking aloud here!
At the moment there are two camps - you can or you can't. Personally, I
think the 'you can' argument is weak at the moment, as legislation involving
Council Tax was developed to appease the masses after Community Charge -
basically giving 'your data will only ever be used for Council Tax
purposes'. The fact that further legislation has been passed to allow
certain further use legally, would seem to indicate that other further use
is ultra vires.
However, the 'you can' argument could possibly be strengthened by looking at
how you can (ramble ramble).
To get to the point - the Local Government Act 2003 section 85, allows
Council Tax data (name and address or number for communicating) to be used
to identify vacant dwellings.
To do this efficiently you might take your LLPG and create an 'empty homes'
database (owned by the Housing Dept?) - to find empty homes you might need
to add the names of known occupants to this database from Council Tax
(obviously the empty homes wouldn't have occupants).
Then the Local Government Act allows you to do anything that will benefit
the citizen (e.g. run a CRM system, or populate the CRM with data from
another database). If you're in the 'you can' use CT data camp do that,
otherwise use you're new 'empty homes' database.
Sorry for rambling, and happy to have these thoughts torn apart in the
interests of getting to a legal solution.
---------------------------------------------
Lively debate to follow!!!
Regards
Paul
Paul Lightowlers (Information & IEG Manager)
Teignbridge District Council,
Brunel Road,
Newton Abbot,
TQ12 4XX
Tel. 01626 215210
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