Registration

'The Paradox of National Registration in a Liberal State: The Case of Wartime National Registers in Great Britain, 1915–52' by Christine Bellamy in (2019) 134(570) The English Historical Review comments

This article traces the history of British government policy on wartime national registration from 1915 to 1952. In contrast to accounts that emphasise the significance of registration for the development of an ‘information state’, it explores the implications of the fundamental paradox in national registration in a liberal state. That is, the distinctive value of a register lies in its continuing accuracy and comprehensiveness; but these properties depend on wholesale and continuing compliance with the bureaucratic demands of a tool widely regarded in Whitehall as intrusive, coercive and unpopular. The register used in the First World War never recovered from Whitehall’s unwillingness to enforce it, and preparations for registration in a second major war were frustrated by the reluctance of its principal users — those responsible for military conscription and food rationing — to be closely associated with it or dependent on it. The article explains why a robust register was nevertheless set up in 1939, but suggests, too, that the capabilities it offered to identify and trace people were less warmly welcomed and extensively exploited by other government services than is often assumed. Furthermore, the perceived need to maximise trust in its confidentiality restricted the disclosure of information recorded in the register to other public agencies, especially the police. The overall thrust of the article, then, is to cast doubt on whether the wartime national registers in the Great Britain could have developed into a formative pillar of an emergent information state.

Bellamy argues

The significance of the introduction of a national register in Great Britain during the First World War and its subsequent use during the Second may seem obvious. During two international conflicts, the British government operated a purpose-built register of the population that was separate from pre-existing administrative records systems and capable of supporting multiple administrative functions. Every registered individual was also issued with an identity document. Yet the association drawn by A.J.P. Taylor between the growth of state power and the identification and registration of ‘law-abiding Englishmen’ (and women) was, in practice, complex: the hold of national registration proved less than absolute, with significant consequences for the later capabilities of the state. There are a number of puzzles about national registration in twentieth-century Britain which need explaining. Why was it introduced so late? Why was it quickly discontinued after 1918? Why was it abandoned, almost friendless, seven years after the end of the Second World War? After all, one might have expected the developing welfare state of the 1906–16 Liberal Government and of the post-1945 governments, both Labour and Conservative, to have seen some value in embedding the register into the management of public services. And even if the creation of a register was most strongly associated with the wartime state’s need to conscript troops and ration food, it may seem surprising that the welfare state did not build on these foundations given the many other functions a national register could have served. 

With the exception of Rosemary Elliot’s analysis of the politics of national registration in 1915–18, the necessity of such arrangements during the First World War has usually been taken for granted by historians, and even Elliot regards the flawed register compiled in 1915 as a stepping stone towards the inevitable triumph of national registration in the Second World War. But why, and by whom, a register was considered necessary to the efficient running of the wartime state in the first half of the twentieth century has never been systematically explored. Most discussion of national registers and identity cards has occurred within high-level, broad-brush accounts of the development of the ‘information state’ or of governments’ use of information technologies. In these, registration has been treated primarily as an outcome of struggles between the champions of individual liberty and national efficiency or between different conceptions of national identity, or as an early example of the surveillance of a mass population. It is widely believed that national registration expanded the means by which the British government might know, identify and trace its population, and that it symbolised the increasingly intrusive state bureaucracy necessitated by modern warfare and welfare. But there has been little interest in identifying the limits placed on the uses to which the register could be put, considering how such limits affected the register’s functions and scope, or ascertaining why it was that limits were introduced at all. And, more generally, few studies have systematically explored the ways in which national registration was shaped by policy-makers in Whitehall, and the roles of competing views within government about population registration and the inter-departmental politics of war planning. In other words, little has been written about national registration that grounds it firmly in the history of British government and administration. 

This article examines the history of wartime national registration from 1915 to 1952, with an emphasis on the often fraught inter-departmental relations in Whitehall, especially between those in charge of registration, military conscription and control of food supplies. Using extensive data available in The National Archives, it will show that, throughout this period, there was little consensus in government about whether a stand-alone, multi-purpose national register was necessary, cost-effective or politically acceptable. Far from winning the argument, as Elliot has claimed, Sir Sylvanus Vivian, the Registrar-General from 1921 to 1945, was fretting as late as the summer of 1938 about whether he would be permitted to prepare a satisfactory scheme in time for the outbreak of war. The fact that an effective national register was compiled in September 1939 does not reflect settled agreement in government about its value, purposes or scope. Rather, throughout this whole period, the development of national registration was shaped by contradictory demands. Furthermore, these contradictions do not only reflect the tensions, noted by Elliot, between the register’s twofold function as an instrument both of ‘surveillance’ and of delivering ‘entitlement’ to public services. They also inhered more fundamentally in the proposition that in a liberal society, a mass population could be induced to comply, and to go on complying, with the bureaucratic demands of a national register, the core purpose of which was the more effective enforcement of the burdens imposed on it by the wartime state. ... 

In endeavouring to introduce order into the health insurance records, Vivian formulated doctrines about large-scale administrative registers to which he adhered for the rest of his life. First, no decentralised records system can be reliable unless it runs on uniform lines, imposed from the centre and ‘rigidly adhered to’. Many British names occur frequently (the John Smiths) and are unstable in use (the same John Smith might sign himself J. Smith, J.L. Smith, Jack Smith, Johnny Smith). This means, secondly, that individuals cannot be reliably identified by name and date of birth: unique identifying numbers are also needed. Thirdly, all decentralised schemes need a central index showing the local registers in which individuals’ records are to be found. All changes, especially the issue of new cards and the replacement of lost ones, must be transacted through this central index, to ensure that no person has a live entry in more than one local register. Only thus can ‘inflation’, the besetting sin of all registers, be checked. Fourthly—and critically for the argument here—Vivian believed throughout his professional life in the importance of tempering ‘any restrictive machinery to the character of the population under control’. His early experience in national insurance taught him that the ‘genius of the nation’ was characterised by ‘the freedom of its private life from the incursions of bureaucracy, its unfamiliarity with and distaste for formalities of procedure and “red tape”’. Furthermore, wholesale non-compliance cannot be dealt with by legal sanctions because ‘it is impossible to prosecute a whole population’. The only systematic ways to ensure that everyone registers and keeps their details up to date are to place a statutory duty to register people on a limited number of responsible people (such as employers) on whom it can be enforced, or to link registration with ‘the personal self-interest of the individual or with the action which he would normally take in his own self-interest’. In other words, faced with people who were unused to filling in complicated forms or safeguarding unfamiliar documents, Vivian hoped to use their transactions with services that offered direct and immediate benefits to collect the information needed for the register.

In discussing later years Bellamy states

The comprehensiveness and reliability of the register used between 1939 and 1952, together with the range of information it eventually provided to other government agencies, has led it to be regarded as a potentially significant step in building capacity in British government for keeping its population under surveillance. It certainly provided infrastructure for what Higgs labels an ‘information state’; one characterised by the ‘generalised and structured collection’ of information about the population in ‘standardised form for ease of analysis and retrieval’. But, as Higgs recognises, national registration was a cul de sac. It was terminated in 1952 and, despite several attempts, was never resurrected; and we will see that even its contemporary achievements have been overstated. But it did — temporarily —enlarge the capacity of the British state for processing structured, searchable information about its population. First, this enhanced its capacity for social and demographic analysis. The register supplied timely data about population movements and demographic change, both for wartime manpower and social planning and for post-war reconstruction. Most data were supplied in aggregated, non-identifiable form, but the register also supplied sampling frames containing identifiable data to the Medical Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation and several universities and charities, on the strict condition that the source was not revealed to research participants. Mainly because the central register recorded changes of address between registration areas, the register also provided, at least in principle, the means to identify and trace a very high proportion of the population. Its core work was in support of conscription and rationing, as described above. But by 1949, information was being supplied from up to fourteen government agencies, and presenting an identity card had become necessary to obtain a passport, access labour exchange services and council house waiting lists, make a war damage claim, or withdraw money from the Post Office Savings Bank. The most voluminous services of information were routine ones to other government departments, consisting of dates of birth to verify claims for the new family allowances and for the repayment of post-war credits. After 1948, the register also supplied the addresses of beneficiaries or contributors with whom the Ministry of National Insurance (MNI) had lost touch. By 1951, the CNRO had provided MNI with 750,000 addresses and 1.3 million dates of birth from a register of about 43 million people. Deaths and embarkations were also notified to the NHS so that patient lists could be updated, a process assisted by the adoption of national registration numbers for primary care—although not for hospital—records when the NHS was set up in 1947–8. Information was also supplied to the cancer register, to follow up tuberculosis patients, and to trace absconders from mental health institutions. The register was used to update the Home Office’s statutory aliens register; a special tracing service was provided under the Defence Regulations to Special Branch, M15 and the Bank of England; and information about suspected criminals given to the police. No agency was given direct access to the register. Disclosures generally consisted of specific items of information, usually addresses or dates of birth, provided on standard forms from which agencies updated their own records. 

Almost all disclosures from the register, including those to government departments, were made under section 8(2) of the National Registration Act (1939), which prohibited disclosure on pain of criminal sanction, except by explicit authorisation of the Minister of Health or Registrar-General. These provisions were in line with those governing the decennial census, but they also reflected a general convention about confidentiality then applied in departments responsible for large-scale administrative systems, particularly personal taxation, national insurance and public assistance. It was clearly restated by a Home Office minister in 1949, replying to parliamentary pressure for the register to offer ‘facilities’ to enforce maintenance orders: It was undoubtedly the intention of the House that that information should not be revealed from that source unless it was for the purpose of criminal proceedings or for matters of similar importance ... I think it would be recognised—and this is true of other Departments as well—that the Departments do receive the information that comes into their hands for a quite specific purpose concerning those Departments and this House in many Bills ... where provision has been made for the obtaining of information, has always insisted that the information should be used only for that purpose and not for others. 

This approach was politically defensible, but it was also intended to establish and maintain trust in the register, and thus maximise public compliance with registration, by avoiding disclosures that would ‘impair the efficiency of the National Register machinery in securing its main purpose, by stimulating public hostility and an unwillingness to co-operate in the notification of changes of address’.  This reasoning was explained by George North, Vivian’s successor, to a senior Treasury official who unsuccessfully pressed the GRO to help trace debtors of government departments: So long as the information in the National Register is regarded as confidential the public will freely notify such events as changes of address and tell us the truth about their ages etc. As soon, however, as the citizen knows that the information he gives ... may at any time be used against him we shall begin to lose the confidence of the public, and that is bound to affect the accuracy and up-to-dateness of the Register on which its usefulness depends. 

The confidentiality of personal information was not absolute, however, and the responsible minister had discretion to authorise disclosure as he saw fit. After 1945, the GRO was faced with a growing number of requests for information, often stemming from social dislocation in the aftermath of war, including a moral panic about deserted wives. So officials were forced to judge when disclosure—or more often, a refusal to disclose—was appropriate and defensible. They were also under pressure to maximise goodwill, in the light of growing uncertainty about the register’s future. It is unsurprising, therefore, that they attempted on several occasions to make policy on disclosure more explicit and consistent, and tried to tighten up practices at local level. In the process, some general conventions were confirmed. 

First, disclosures were often permitted when they were clearly in the interest of the individual whose details were sought. For example, addresses of untraced claimants for compensation were supplied to the War Damage Commission: ‘obviously a case where the information is for their advantage’. Information was similarly given to dependents of people killed in air raids, to facilitate an application for financial assistance under successive Emergency Powers Acts, as well as to departments wanting to trace people to whom unpaid wages or pensions were due. Conversely, disclosure was usually refused when it was potentially detrimental to the individual. Addresses were never supplied to commercial debt collectors, to the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise or to local authorities seeking to recover money (for example, from ‘liable relatives’ in welfare cases), and the GRO normally refused to disclose addresses in cases of matrimonial desertion, unless compelled by a court order. Similarly, the GRO forwarded letters from relatives to missing persons rather than disclose addresses, in case an approach was unwelcome. This practice was also adopted for missing-person inquiries from the British and International Red Cross, the War Office Casualty Branch and the World Jewish Congress, but not from the Salvation Army or Citizens Advice Bureaux who were unable to vouch for inquirers. Addresses were given, however, to local education authorities so that they could trace the parents of deserted evacuees, on condition that no attempts were made to reclaim billeting costs. 

How extensively the register should be used to assist the police was a much tougher question because, much more than the security services or the military, the police interacted with the civilian population on whose co-operation it was thought to depend. As with other government departments, the GRO tried to restrict disclosures to the police to cases of ‘serious’ crime and ‘national security’, but it was difficult to specify, let alone enforce, a threshold: requests required the sole authorisation of a senior police officer, and local registration clerks often lacked the confidence or expertise to resist. The GRO feared that that requests from the police would become administratively burdensome, but, above all, that they would incentivise large numbers of people to evade registration and would bring the register into disrepute. For similar reasons, North became increasingly nervous about the continued use after the war of section 6(4) of the National Registration Act, which permitted police officers to require individuals to produce their identity cards (the visible token of national registration and thus the focus of much of the antipathy to it). Indeed, his Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, tried unsuccessfully to have this power abolished on the grounds that it was inappropriate in peacetime. North particularly disliked a Statutory Order of May 1941 which permitted its use for minor traffic violations, including parking offences. This order was used most frequently by the Metropolitan Police, who kept a special register of traffic offences and claimed that the unique numbers provided by identity cards guaranteed its accuracy. The Home Office consistently argued that, so long as the register continued, police forces should be allowed to make full use of it, so the GRO could only plead with Chief Constables to limit the use of section 6(4) powers to exceptional cases. In the event, it was Clarence Henry Willcock’s refusal to obey Constable Muckle’s instruction to produce his identity card when he was stopped in London for speeding that led on 26 June 1951 to notoriously damning remarks by Lord Chief Justice Goddard, which finally undermined the legitimacy (though not the legality) of peacetime national registration. On 27 June, the 1941 Order was withdrawn, and, after meeting the Home Secretary, the Acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner instructed that section 6(4) powers be used only in cases of serious crime or desertion, because ‘public opinion will not support in time of peace the free use of what was originally a war time measure’. But the damage had been done. Despite increasing international tension associated with the Korean War, which led many civil servants to expect a reprieve, the Conservative Government elected in October 1951 immediately took the decision to terminate the register, and it ceased to operate on 21 February 1952. 

It is impossible to know how scrupulously conventions about disclosure laid down in London were followed in local offices. We have seen that there was anxiety during the First World War about the susceptibility of local registration officers to pressure from recruiting officers to provide information outside agreed procedures, and that there were similar worries about their ability to withstand pressure from police forces and the security services, especially after 1945. However, a post-war Organisation and Methods (O&M) report by the Treasury complained that few local registers were actually marked up, as required, to enable people of special interest—including aliens, deserters and suspected criminals—to be traced if their addresses changed. That, is, although local registration staff may well have released information informally to other local agencies, local registers were not systematically maintained such that individuals could reliably be traced. This neglect may have reflected squeamishness among local officers about the disciplinary functions of the register, or it might, more probably, indicate indifference born of more urgent demands. For the fact is that the provision of identification and tracing services to other agencies formed only a small part of the register’s work, especially at local level. Most effort went into maintaining the register itself. According to the O&M report, the register absorbed 15,420 staff weeks in the first six months of 1947, but, while 63 per cent (9,868) were devoted to the maintenance of the register, only 3 per cent (485) went to supporting (post-war) national service and less than 1 per cent (83 and 96 respectively) to providing addresses and dates of birth for all purposes. To make the point another way: routine administrative notifications relating to national insurance and conscription aside, only 100,000 addresses were supplied by both local and central offices throughout the register’s lifetime to ‘other government departments and agencies’, including the police and security services.

 'Surveillance in Weak States: The Problem of Population Information in Afghanistan' by Ali Karimi in (2019) 13 International Journal of Communication comments

Surveillance scholarship has long been focused on surveillance technologies in strong states. This article explores the technological challenges of governing Afghanistan, a weak state, where reliable population data do not exist. In assessing the ways governance is practiced in a country of “ghosts,” I show that the failure of the state in Afghanistan is linked to a chronic poverty of reliable information on the country’s population and geography. A weak state with limited access to reliable population data must use force instead of knowledge to govern the country. I also argue that the digital technologies of surveillance practiced by the Afghan state and the U.S. military to substitute for the lack of traditional forms of government data are not effective and cannot strengthen the state’s capacity to deliver services. In contributing to debates on surveillance and security, this article provides a technological critique of state failure in Afghanistan by highlighting the costs of poor population information.