'Boggling' fee for access to weekly updates on deaths attacked

Death is a public event. All human societies mark the occasion; all advanced civilisations record it. But the British government has decided that only the well-heeled can have access to such records: it has put a price tag of £62,000 on a new up-to-date feed of registrations of deaths.

While individual death records are in the public domain as soon as they are registered, such data is not much use for keeping business records up to date. Owners of mailing lists have long campaigned for access to bulk data. Mailing dead people is bad for a company's reputation, as well as a waste of money - there are about 600,000 deaths a year in the UK. Up-to-date notifications can also prevent fraud by people assuming the identities of individuals who they - but not a bank or mail-order company - know to be dead. The snag is that information about deaths could be abused by businesses preying on the bereaved.

In 2006, the government decided on a compromise: it would make the information available from registrars but only for the purpose of preventing fraud. Procedures and prices published last month suggest that releases will be tightly controlled.

The new disclosure of death registration information (DDRI) scheme - run by the General Register Office, part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) - offers a weekly update of death registrations, at a price. To qualify, customers must persuade a panel that they will use the information "appropriately".

"It is possible that a meeting with the applicant will be necessary," the office warns. If successful, they must then undergo a security assessment, for a fee of £5,000. If they pass that, they can start receiving the information on payment of £57,000 a year - in advance.

The Direct Marketing Association, which has been lobbying since 1991 for access to death registration data, welcomed the new measures. However, the Stop Dead Consortium, a group of 20 organisations who exchange information about deaths for "list cleaning" purposes, warned that the price would prevent the official data being used by all but a very small number of big companies.

The ONS has not revealed how it calculated the subscription figure, but said it had no choice in the matter: "The charge levels have been set to recover these costs in full in line with Her Majesty's Treasury Guidance on Fees and Charges." Keith Dugmore of the Demographics User Group, which represents business users of national statistics and other official data, described the charge as "boggling".

Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign agrees with Dugmore. We also note that the new service's security precautions - registration data will be sent encrypted on password-protected CDs and delivered only to named recipients - are highly overdue when dealing with live individuals. They seem excessive when dealing with dead ones, though.

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