To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families pursuant to the answer of 26 February 2009, Official Report, columns 1068-9W, on children: databases, what assessment he has made of the merits of enabling ContactPoint to match variant spellings of surnames. (261667)

ContactPoint uses phonetic matching and alternatives for surnames in the same way as it does for forenames. It will also consider matches of surname against forenames. This enables ContactPoint to cater for situations where surname and forenames are interchangeable and could be incorrectly ordered, e.g. James Thomas, Thomas James.