Council staff get access to massive database on every child in England
James Slack writes in the Daily Mail:
Town hall bureaucrats will today be given access to a hugely controversial database containing the personal details of every child in England.
The ContactPoint computer contains the name, address, date of birth, GP and school of all under-18s.
The £224million project has been hit by a string of delays amid concerns over the security of the highly sensitive data it holds. But Children’s Secretary Ed Balls will today announce it is being rolled out across the country.
In the same article he also notes the Coroners and Justice Bill data-sharing clause:
The launch comes amid controversy over a second ‘Big Brother’ plan in a Government Bill, due to be debated today, which will allow all public bodies to share in bulk with each other the private details of every person in Britain.
The measure, contained in the Coroners and Justice Bill, will sweep away data protection restrictions that require information to be used only for the purpose it was taken, such as limiting access to health records to the Department of Health.
The civil liberties group Privacy International gave a string of chilling examples of ways in which information could be shared.
Philip Johnston has a comment piece in the Daily Telegraph about data sharing:
What is fundamentally wrong is the assumption that the state has a right to know everything about us. Personal data is ours to be handed over when it suits us, not the other way around. Of course, there are people with criminal intent whose data the police will need to access; but that is no reason to treat the country as a pool of suspects.
