Business as usual for ‘Big Brother state’?
Brian Wheeler writes on the BBC web site:
The pressure to make efficiency savings by any means possible – and the fear of expensive legal action from IT suppliers if contracts are cancelled means that some big IT schemes conceived by Labour are going ahead as planned.
For example, a huge scheme to transfer all medical records in England on to a central database – criticised by the Conservatives and Lib Dems when they were in opposition – is being rolled-out despite concerns from some GPs that patient trust will be compromised.
But alarm bells really began to ring for civil liberties’ campaigners when Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude and Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander unveiled the head of the coalition’s new Efficiency and Reform group, which is likely to play a crucial role driving through massive cuts in public spending across government departments.
Football fans will know Ian Watmore as the former chief executive of the FA, but in a former life, as a top civil servant under Tony Blair, he was the prime mover behind “transformational government”, Labour’s controversial plan to allow public sector workers to share data on individuals.
When it was launched in 2005, this was seen as the key to making big savings in the delivery of public services. It never grabbed headlines in the way that ID cards did, but to civil liberties campaigners it represented just as big a threat.
