NO2ID

Hi there.

Looking for advice in formulating a letter to my children's primary school forbidding them to share ANY data into contact point. It seems from aletter we have received that "a maintained school in England is required by law to supply basic information to ContactPoint.... This includes name and address, contact details for their parents or carers and the contact details of the school". The data collection sheet they have enclosed also contains info on religion, ethnicity, home language, GP details, medical conditions etc.

I was under the impression that Contact Point had not been launched yet...

Any advice welcome.

As I understand it Contact Point is designed to be a common reference point for professional services, i.e. it will simply indicate that person 'X' exists: DoB, address, etc. but NOT hold case notes or any opinion. It's basically a way of agencies being able to communicate and co-ordinate their services to children and their families.

I'm not trying to suggest there is no reason to be concerned about it, but of itself it seems fairly benign. The problems arise in the ways it might be used and by whom.

The school will be obliged to supply the basic details, and you, and they, have no legal opt out; though if you have a significant role in public/celebrity life you may qualify to have certain details (address, etc.), screened out from display on the system.

Perhaps you can ask the school for details about what the information they are asking for will be used for, and exactly what information about your child they are being asked to pass on to outside agencies, then work from there. Definitely try not to rant at the school. You will probably find that members of staff are just as disquieted by some of what is being demanded, and why, as you are.

Sorry, have to strongly disagree. Have a look at these videos on Children's databases by the Foundation for Information Policy Research:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Archrights

I won't argue with you. I think in terms of design and implementation ContactPoint looks poor, and the 'unintended consequences' are likely to be serious, but the basic principle of allowing relevant 'welfare' agencies to co-ordinate their work and information is not intrinsically a bad one. In fact given the difficulty, wastage, and damage that goes on under present systems it is not surprising that such a technological fix has been floated.

Unfortunately, for whatever reasons, the British Govt./Civil Service, with few exceptions, seem incapable of coming up with any kind of solution that tackles 'the problem' with integrity, humility, justice, efficacy, and true responsibility.

For children 'at risk' then, yes. For the vast majority of children then, no.

Contact Point breaches Human Rights and the Data Protection Act. It just needs someone with gumption and cash to give it a legal push and it will fall over.

The problem is when we start getting into 'data sharing' the reality that we don't live in a nice tidy 'black or white' world has to be faced.

Take 'children at risk'; at first glance it seems like an easily defined category, but think about it some more, or work in the field, and you quickly find the edges are blurry. Decisions, often based on intuition and experience as much as hard evidence, are being made continually. Frameworks are in place to try and help 'objective' assessments of risk to be made, but they are not foolproof and it would be foolish to rely on them as the sole means of deciding.

Then there are all the other areas of life where individuals and families flit in and out of professional carers' attention. Some are a constant presence, others may turn up once during a major crisis, or over something relatively trivial, and never trouble the services again.

How do the people who 'carry the can' for decisions made and not made, make best use of their time, training, and the money that we spend on them?

I'm not trying to defend ContactPoint, merely trying to give it some kind of real world context. The system we have now works, up to a point, fails regularly at a low/medium level and occasionally fails spectacularly and/or tragically.

It's easy to see why 'CP' should be proposed. Perhaps what we need is some mechanism for increasing the probability of making genuinely 'good' proposals, rather than politically expedient ones.

Thanks for the replies so far. Any further advice welcome

For me only one of the issues is the fact that "high profile" people's children won't be part of this DB. To me this either means that "high profile" people are viewed as being unlikely to harm their children or the authorities agree that there is an inherent risk of sharing such personal information. If the latter is true then it is true for all...

All animals are equal springs to mind

'High profile' people's children WILL be part of CP, but their details will be 'hidden' behind an extra layer of security.

The 'some are more equal than others' argument is well worth making. Unfortunately it's not an easy problem to get round once data starts to be shared---no real problem if all the data is kept on a card index or paper files. Perhaps that's the answer!

Otherwise, there will always be people who, because of their public profile, are going to be much more at risk of unwelcome intrusions into their privacy than the rest of us. I'm sure it's not beyond our wit to properly 'hide' everyone's details, it'll just be more expensive and (to be cynical), may mean giving power to the people that those 'in charge' would prefer to keep for themselves.

Although the press have picked on the use of shielding to highlight its use in securing the details of children of public figures (and Adair is correct that thye will be on CP, if they live in England), the main use of this category is associated with children from abusive relationships, witness protection prtogramme etc. All valid reasons.

As for only putting on only those children 'at risk' - that would defeat the whole point! Only by agencies being able to see what other agencies have been involved with a child will alarm bells be rung and investigations begun which could prevent a death. Note that Barnardo's have come out in favour of CP, and NSPCC almost certainly will too. Not exactly agents of the state, are they?

CP is very different from the NIR proposals as it holds minimum personal data, and if hacked is unlikley to provide much useful info to a criminal. It's only when you put all your eggs in one basket, like NIR, that you provide the basis or simple identity theft....

One of the main worries I see connected with CP is the old problem of 'function creep'. Who gets to use the system, for what purposes, and what gets added to the system further down the line, are all matters which I am sure (though I'll stand corrected as I haven't checked), the CP legislation is either vague or silent about.

There have already been queries about police access and use of the system.

The problem is that it's the council's Director of Children's Services who decides what's a "valid reason". He/she is judge and jury in the decision on whether a parent's address is made available to 330,000 people up and down the country. If I work at (say) Huntingdon Life Sciences, one animal rights sympathiser amongst those 330,000 could use CP to retrieve my address, the school where my children attend, etc, and pass the data to people who disapprove of my work.

The Director of Children's Services will have no idea of all the people in his/her balliwick who might have "valid reasons" for shielding. Unless he/she sends a letter to everyone asking "should you be shielded", the people in question may not be aware that they should be.

And let's just remind ourselves that the 330,000 CP users include people who work outside government, for charities like Barnado's. How can government guarantee that they are all adequately vetted?

If I had children under 16, I would be writing to my director of children's services demanding that their records be shielded, because they deserve the same level of protection as Gordon Brown's children.

I've just had an interesting discussion with someone directly responsible for implementing CP in our neck of the woods, and being the PR interface with the public.

Without rehashing a lot of stuff the one area they had no answer for, and said that they were not aware of what exactly would be put in place, was this question: 'How easy will if be for me to check the information about my children that CP holds, and to see who has been using that info. and why?'

Possibly 'the Govt.' may come good on this and offer transparency as well as a decent stab at proper security. On the other hand, what odds that we get a paternalistic pat on the head, maybe even a promise of access, but a reality that makes that access more or less unusable?

If there's no evidence that a child is being abused or is at risk then there is no reason for them being on a database such as ContactPoint. By having the details of all children in the country then the government is implying that every child is a potential abuse victim and every parent is a potential abuser. That's a highly cynical view of humanity and is not showing taxpaying parents the benefit of the doubt that they all deserve.

I was surprised to hear that Barnardos support ContactPoint and they've lost my respect because of it. I've got a standing order donation set up to the NSPCC but if they also come out in support of ContactPoint then I'll cancel it immediately.

I'm not surprised that children's charities are in favour of it because they are not concerned with the bigger picture, only children who are at risk.

Putting children considered to be at risk on the register would be quite sensible. There is absolutely no reason to put all children on the register. An entry could be created by the relevant agency if they had any concerns about a child. This would solve the issue of agencies not talking to each other. If a school has concerns about a child they should be raising it with Social Services.

As for 'intuition and experience' I'm afraid that I totally reject this as a basis for declaring a child at risk. This is exactly the kind of scenario - thoughts, suspicions, intuition, which is going to land some innocent parents in a lot of problems once ContactPoint is established. Huge snooping databases thrive on 'reports by concerned individuals with no evidence' a la Stalinist Russia.

'Intuition and experience' cannot be ignored---it's what human beings use to combine with 'facts' to come to sensible decisions about how other human beings are behaving. We're dealing with people, not chemicals in a bottle or some other mechanistic process.

As for only putting 'children at risk' on the CP---I tend to go for the less is more approach too. I think it is far more proportionate and effective. The problem with it is, as I have already said, that 'children at risk' is, in practice, not such a nice tidy discreet package as we might like to think it is.

.. unfortunately, all I could afford was a stroppy letter..

Dear Mrs *****,

Thank you for the letter home of 2 October, in which we were informed that certain personal details we provided to the school for the purposes of home/school communication are to be entered onto various government databases without our permission.

Of particular concern to us at the moment is the ContactPoint system – a database that will be accessible to 330, 000 civil servants and has been in part developed by the firm which recently lost the private records of every prisoner in England and Wales. The criticism of this system, from the Information Commissioner, the Government’s own Joint Committee on Human Rights, Foundation for Information Policy Research, the LSE and many others have lead us to the considered view that we are simply not interested in being monitored in this way by those whom we elected to be accountable to us.

Whilst we appreciate that school operates under various statutory obligations, we would like to register our objection to any of *****’s personal information being passed outside of the school without our permission. Clearly, if a relationship of trust cannot be developed between school and parents without involving 330,000 civil servants and an insecure database (which treats the children of members of Parliament differently to the rest of us) we will be left in the unfortunate position of having to think a little more carefully about what personal data we provide to school in the future.

As the school website is out of action at the time of writing we would appreciate a paper copy of the Layer 2 document, together with a copy of the data the school holds about *****.

Kind Regards,

Adair - you can either identify children at risk through 'intuition and experience' or you cannot.

If you can, then there could be an argument for creating a database entry only for children considered to be at risk, either through evidence or through experience or intuition.

Alternatively, if you cannot, then there is no argument possible for entering 'suspicions' on a huge database.

I think that sums it up. You and I will not agree on the intuition element - I think that intuition plays no part with something as fundamental as the possibility of people's children being taken away. That way lies injustice.


I think that the facts show that failure to protect children at risk has not been due to a failure of intuition (is a course in mind-reading a prerequisite for Social Work training?), but a failure to follow procedures, to operate to a professional standard, and to communicate. And as a direct result of these professional failures, and of the overall low professional standards of Child Protection Social Workers we, the public, are facing the nightmare that is ContactPoint.

(Obviously none of the above is aimed at you personally as I have no knowlege of you or your work. Possibly we will have to agree to disagree on the whole subject)

I am in no way suggesting that 'intuition and experience' by themselves are sufficient grounds for putting anyone on any kind of official list. What I am suggesting is that 'intuition and experience' describes the essential human input into decision making based on available facts that distinguish us from computers, or any other 'non-thinking' means of making a decision.

Surely this is one of the major weaknesses of any reliance on databases and search algorithms, whether they are designed to weed out terrorists, paedophiles, or any group nominated as undesirable by the state/society. Without that 'human' input people end up being treated as industrial commodities without any recourse or hope that a more 'rational' and 'humane' decision might be made.

As it stands, whatever other weaknesses and failings it may have, ContactPoint is NOT a decision making device, but merely a means of enabling disparate welfare agencies to communicate more effectively. That doesn't mean that CP is the most appropriate tool for that job, or that there are not reasons to be concerned about how it may in fact be used.

FWIW I work in a field closely related to child protection. Most of the people I work with are professional in their conduct, but two things are very obvious: 1. they remain ordinary fallible human beings, and 2. a reliable and effective means of communicating across the various agencies, and over time, does not exist.

CP will not be a panacea. I am not even convinced it will do the job required of it, but I can see why it has been proposed.

You can't. You have to campaign for the scheme itself to be cancelled. The Children Act 2004 specifically exempts ContactPoint's data sharing from any rule of common or statute law that would otherwise prevent it.

You may want to go ahead and cancel your standing order to the NSPCC as they are most definitely in favour of ContactPoint and have been from the beginning. It wouldn't surprise me if volunteers who work on their helpline have direct access to CP at some point in the future.

Let's be clear, ContactPoint has never just been about saving the life of a child or preventing another Climbie* (if it was ever about that at all), after all, if you're looking for a needle in a haystack then you don't build a bigger haystack. The primary function of CP has always been about the 'bigger' issue of reducing anti-social behaviour and crime.

Also, CP is showing itself to be ID cards by the back door. It has been this governments desire, since before the Climbie Inquiry, to track its citizens and it has devised a way of doing this from birth to death and as it's for 'the children' only heartless bastards could possibly be against it.

*It's unlikely that Victoria Climbie would have been on ContactPoint because she was only temporary resident in this country.

How can a staute exempt ContactPoint from any rule of Common Law? Which takes presidence, Common Law or Statue Law? It is my understanding that statute law cannot ride roughshod over Common Law rights such as privacy.

I'm sorry but I must disagree with you there; I shall be fighting to uphold my Common Law rights despite unlawful statutes designed to destroy them. I shall also be writing to my kids school as follows.

Guy: if/when an ID card scheme comes in, will you sign up for a card but then lobby for the scheme to be repealed? Or will you refuse to take a card on the ground that it violates your right to privacy?

Your response to this question seems to indicate the former.

An alternative view is that you'd have to use European law, as that supercedes UK law. European law, gives you the right to family life, right to privacy (contact point violates both of these).

The fastest option is to vote Conservative, as I believe they won't operate the full version of Contact point - their version will only be for children at risk, but I'll happily stand corrected.

wow - you are out there!

I think you will find that most charities so-called aimed at child protection are in favour of contact point - action for children formerly NCH amongst others will be - because they all have contracts one way or another with LA

'dont bite the hand that feeds you'

I wouldnt hold your breathe
Kent is a Conservative led LA and allows all sorts of invasive measures to occur and dont appear to give a stuff about human or family rights

they have allowed bio-metric library system in their schools ex-director childrens services (now diretor Haringay) even had a picture in the local rag promoting it - all without parental consent needs even in primary schools. Including allowing forced adoption over placing children with grandparents/relatives - no human/family rights for the children.

And we are giving them a free hand to do far more damage through contactpoint - unfortuantely it is not he party that counts its the individuals within the party that run things

And in an old boys freemason closed shop the occasionally they may slip in a female (only one of their own) who wont rock the boat, the public really stand no chance.