This database is good mother, not big brother
Alice Miles, writing in the Times, defends ContactPoint:
The new ContactPoint system, which will hold the details of 11million children, is one way to help professionals to protect Kelly and Tom, not a way to attack Laura and Eleanor. It would be better to ask whether there will be enough information on the system to make it effective, not least since it appears that the children most at risk, who come from abusive family backgrounds, will have their details “shielded” to prevent hacking by dangerous relatives.
Whether this will prove an effective (and, at £224 million, cost-effective) way of protecting children is a moot point. It will help, certainly. But no amount of information sharing can make up for the concerned and intelligent individual with the courage to say that something seems wrong: without that, inputting data can be a cover-up for the lack of meaningful action, as the case of Baby P showed.
January 28th, 2009 at 13:31
Actually a database is a computer system, not a relative of any kind. Alice Miles presents a very simplistic, one-sided view of the matter, presumably based on a superficial reading of government speeches and presentations and not much else.
As a computer industry veteran with some experience of bidding for very big government contracts, I found my attention was immediately seized by the figure of £224 million. Automatically, I replaced that with “…somewhere north (possibly very far north) of £1 billion”. But then what’s a billion or two in these interesting times, when governments fling hundreds of billions or trillions of our money around with careless abandon?
The potential for abuse of such a comprehensive database, accessible by so many people – many of them unvetted and poorly paid – seems indisputable. But without even opening that discussion, think how much could be achieved with “£224 million” (or whatever the real cost will turn out to be) if it were distributed among our schools. How many more trained teachers, decent classrooms, textbooks, even adequate lockers could we afford?
Ambitious high-tech projects based on naive assumptions and utterly incredible vendor assurances are routinely advocated by those who know least about the technology in question. Needless to say, our dear leaders are counted among these engineering innocents. They would far rather spend the taxpayers’ money on a “highly advanced database system” than on boring old teachers and books. Unfortunately, since they don’t understand either IT or traditional teaching, they are among the least qualified to make such decisions.
February 6th, 2009 at 09:25
These sorts of projects are perfect for Government and the Public Sector – they spend loads of money, produce loads of job creation opportunities, allow politicians to waffle on in generalities and put any judgement of the scheme so far into the future, that they will have nothing to fear when it goes pear-shaped.