Don't Tell Me What I Don't Want To Hear
The British motor industry has long been a thorn in the side of successive Governments since the early 1970s when British Leyland was synonymous with the breakdown in relations between the unions and management. But in the depressing history of British Leyland's terminal decline there can be no more unedifying illustration of political ineptitude than New Labour's handling of MG Rover.
In 2000 New Labour gave its full backing to the Phoenix Consortium's acquisition of Rover for a mere £10. The "rescue" of Rover was touted as an example of how the entrepreneurial spirit was thriving under New Labour.
Fast forward 5 years, to the run up to the 2005 General Election, and things weren't looking quite so rosy. More than £30 million had been siphoned out of the company by the Phoenix Four in a situation that the Financial Times described as "capitalism at its ugliest... a spineless government taken for a ride by entrepreneurs who succeeded only in enriching themselves."
Meanwhile New Labour, in panic and desperation made public pronouncements of support for the MG Rover employees, going so far as to slip the company a £6.5m pre-election bung.
However, it seems that their concern for the thousands of soon-to-be-jobless MG Rover workers was less than superficial.
The following would appear to suggest that New Labour paid Experian Intact to cleanse election canvassing data of any MG Rover employees*.
The relevant entry appears here, in document number HO809 from the Labour Party's campaign return:
Full details from the invoice appear in text below (with the relevant data highlighted):
(* We fully acknowledge the possibility that New Labour paid Experian Intact to add MG Rover workers to their existing database... or build/correct a special database comprised only of MG Rover workers so they could call each one of them in turn to apologise.)
[NOTE - We are currently busy processing the Labour Party's complete campaign return in order to teach the powers that be what the words 'public domain' really mean. Soon you'll be able to search through the documents yourself and find other juicy nuggets that journalists missed in their haste to ruffle Cherie's hair. The devil is in the detail, folks... and we plan to give you access to as much of it as we can. If you wish to help pay for the time spent on data entry, you can click here to make a donation. Thank you.]
UPDATE - Here is the relevant entry from the return summary. Note especially that the expenditure is classified as 'Voter Research' and not 'Unsolicited Materials addressed to Electors' (the latter is what one would expect if this particular data service was used to build a list for a targeted call/letter).
In 2000 New Labour gave its full backing to the Phoenix Consortium's acquisition of Rover for a mere £10. The "rescue" of Rover was touted as an example of how the entrepreneurial spirit was thriving under New Labour.
Fast forward 5 years, to the run up to the 2005 General Election, and things weren't looking quite so rosy. More than £30 million had been siphoned out of the company by the Phoenix Four in a situation that the Financial Times described as "capitalism at its ugliest... a spineless government taken for a ride by entrepreneurs who succeeded only in enriching themselves."
Meanwhile New Labour, in panic and desperation made public pronouncements of support for the MG Rover employees, going so far as to slip the company a £6.5m pre-election bung.
However, it seems that their concern for the thousands of soon-to-be-jobless MG Rover workers was less than superficial.
The following would appear to suggest that New Labour paid Experian Intact to cleanse election canvassing data of any MG Rover employees*.
The relevant entry appears here, in document number HO809 from the Labour Party's campaign return:
Full details from the invoice appear in text below (with the relevant data highlighted):
Return Document Number: HO809
Invoice Number: E504197
Company: Experian Intact
Address: Synectics House, The Brampton, Newcastle, Staffordshire ST5 0QY
Date Expense Incurred: 29/04/2005
Total Invoice Amount: £1,692.00
Amount to be Included in Return: 100%
Labour Party Contact Name: Lee Williams
Expenditure Type: Voting Research
Comments: Data services
Invoice Details:
7 Intact Teleappending jobs undertaken in April 2005 as shown on the attached spreadsheet @ 195 each - £1365.00
Data cleansing undertaken on MG Rover database:
OSIS - No. of records: 2,676 @ rate: 0.0075 - £20.07
Bureau Fee - $54.93
Total - £75.00
Net - £1440.00
VAT - £252.00
TOTAL - £1692.00
(* We fully acknowledge the possibility that New Labour paid Experian Intact to add MG Rover workers to their existing database... or build/correct a special database comprised only of MG Rover workers so they could call each one of them in turn to apologise.)
[NOTE - We are currently busy processing the Labour Party's complete campaign return in order to teach the powers that be what the words 'public domain' really mean. Soon you'll be able to search through the documents yourself and find other juicy nuggets that journalists missed in their haste to ruffle Cherie's hair. The devil is in the detail, folks... and we plan to give you access to as much of it as we can. If you wish to help pay for the time spent on data entry, you can click here to make a donation. Thank you.]
UPDATE - Here is the relevant entry from the return summary. Note especially that the expenditure is classified as 'Voter Research' and not 'Unsolicited Materials addressed to Electors' (the latter is what one would expect if this particular data service was used to build a list for a targeted call/letter).
(Entry HO809 from)
Head Office - General Election Campaign Spending 2004/5
Item Number for the Return: HO809
Invoice Number: E504197
Name of Supplier: Experian Intact
Address of Supplier: Synectics House, The Brampton, Newcastle, Staff. ST5 0QY
Date Expense Incurred: 29/04/2005
Invoice Date: 29/04/2005
Date Invoice Paid: 03/06/2005
Total Invoice Amount: £1,692.00
Portion applied/included in return: 100%
Amount to be included in return: £1,692.00
Type of expenditure: Voting Research
Description: Data services
6 Comments:
Here's a question - where did the Labour party obtain a list of MG Rover employees (yes, assuming that it's employees we're talking about) from to match against (1st step in cleansing from) its own database?
There's no way that employment data should have made its way onto a publically available (at a cost) database.
"Dear Information Commissioner..."
Can you also please post the attached spreadsheet?
1. Good question.
2. The spreadsheet mentioned was not included in the return, but we have added a telling entry from the summary document.
Looking at the invoice again, it's for teleappending. This is essentially adding phone numbers (and ex-directory flags) from the Directory Enquiries database - this is OSIS which is mentioned - to existing database records.
So what we probably have is a database of MG Rover related people, most likely employees, which the campaign wanted to make sure it had phone numbers for. Adding in your note that this is for Voter Research, the purpose is likely to be phoning up ex Rover Employees and asking "Did our £6.5m bung show we had true concern for the British Motor Industry?" with the intent of announcing that "Research shows that sacked MG Rover people think the Motor Industry is Safe In Our Hands."
I think you've got the meaning of "data cleansing" the wrong way round. It normally means giving a company a list of data which is then cleaned against other records (e.g. to remove people who are dead, to remove people who aren't on the electoral register or to add phone numbers).
So I read the invoice as saying that Labour had a database of Rover employees that they got cleaned before using it for campaigning.
Given that this is the only entry of its kind in a series of teleappending invoices amounting to well over £80k, we read it as the MG Rover list being the 'other records' used to clean a larger list.
But even if what we are looking at is a compiled list and/or a number inclusion/classification exercise, it still doesn't look good for New Labour. The only reason they could have to do so under this type of expenditure would be to gauge the effectiveness of their pre-election bribe.
And the question of where they got the initial data remains.
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