Law chief in battle over debt records

A DAVID and Goliath struggle is likely to break out in Whitehall over the future of a tiny organisation that plays a crucial role in running the credit industry.

Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, faces what could become a bitter legal battle in his attempts to put the central register of court judgments out to tender.

He wants commercial firms to be given the chance to run the register in the hope that they would be able to boost the annual turnover of £2m.

The register's lists of county court debt judgments provide vital information for credit assessment agencies, and Registry Trust, the tiny non-profit organisation that has maintained it for nearly 20 years, is fighting back.

In one corner is Falconer's Department for Constitutional Affairs, for which a £150m headquarters is being prepared in Queen Anne's Gate, Westminster.

In the other is the 30-strong staff of the trust, based in modest premises off Euston Road, central London.The trust claims that, legally, the register is not Lord Falconer's to sell because the 'intellectual property' has been created by the trust since 1985.

Chairman Malcolm Hurlston added: 'I believe our human rights would be infringed if the tender were open to commercial, for-profit organisations.'

Falconer is already battling on another front over his plans to reform the register. He wants it expanded to list not only county court judgments against bad debtors, but also the names of those who have failed to pay fines imposed by magistrates' courts.

As the register is inspected by lenders and credit rating agencies, defaulters would find it impossible to obtain loans, mortgages or credit cards. This would have been a powerful lever to defaulters to pay up.

But the Government's independent privacy watchdog, Richard Thomas, has told Falconer that adding their names to the register would involve an improper use of the information provided by courts. Compromise talks are under way between Falconer's department and the commissioner, but the battle with the trust might not be so easily resolved.

Falconer wants the new, expanded register put out to competitive tender, a move described by Hurlston as 'a desire to fix what is clearly not broken'.

He condemned the Government's policy on such tendering, as expressed on an official website, as being intelligible 'only to students of gobbledegook and claptrap', and said: 'It would be a disaster if the price of the information went up under a commercial operator, use of the information fell and lending became less responsible.'