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What good reasons?
But yes agreed it's due to doing this afterwards. Still 100 million got used for a no deal Brexit campaign, and they didn't bother posting a letter about this to all UK addresses.
JWestland-
What good reasons?
This is something I've had a bit of an awakening on recently. When the Tories tried to bring in compulsory ID cards we all pushed back against it - Orwell, big brother, etc., and they backed away. That felt like a good reason at the time.
However those cards would've enabled quite a lot of the nonsense that Farage and his ilk talked, especially the stuff about 'open borders' and 'not knowing who's here' and so on, to be challenged effectively.
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Same reason there was so much opposition to ID cards. There's a real "civil liberties" streak amongst Anglos that you often don't see elsewhere. There are benefits to this (access to the health services is much easier here than other places) and negatives (it becomes the duty of individuals to prove things rather than the state's duty to keep records of them).
ReekBlefs
The trouble is in the UK we have no official residence. Many parts of the world require you to register where you live (after something like 3 months) with the authorities and keep them updated when you move. That kind of thing has always been resisted for lots of good reasons but it means it is much harder to know who is living here, how long for etc. It's inevitable that when you try and infer residence from a collection of other databases gathered for other reasons it's going to be a mess.