WRITTEN ON October 25th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Transformational Government, What do we want?
Maybe government’s IT strategy is not to be a subset of criminal justice after all. The Prime Minister, no less, has described the state of the foundation of trust in our e-enabled public services as far from ideal. In a speech on liberty at Westminster University today Gordon Brown offered as PM to relinquish powers just as he had in gis first days as Chancellor. Specifically he spoke about data sharing (to be reviewed), more freedom of information, biometrics and ID management (no perceptible change of course)
This is the century of information. Our ability to compete in the global economy, to protect ourselves against crime and terrorist attack, depends not just on natural wealth or on walls or fences but on our ability to use information – in industry, in our schools and universities, at our borders, in our police forces and intelligence services. And it is clear that we can use DNA to help solve crimes and we can use new powers of access to information to deny terrorists and criminals financial freedom and the ability to move across borders.
At the same time, a great prize of the information age is that by sharing information across the public sector – responsibly, transparently but also swiftly – we can now deliver personalised services for millions of people, something not dreamt of in 1945 and not possible even ten years ago. So for a pensioner, for example, this might mean dealing with issues about their pension, meals on wheels and a handrail at home together in one phone call or visit, even though the data about those services is held by different bits of the public and voluntary sectors.
But if Governments do not insist on accountability where people’s data is concerned – and are not held independently to account – then we risk losing people’s trust which is fundamental to all these issues and more.
And as what is possible changes, so the protections we afford to individuals must change, and we must respond to the need for a more secure way of establishing and protecting people’s identity; to the new opportunities to use biometrics to identify false passports or DNA to solve crime; to the need to deny terrorists and criminals financial freedom and the ability to move across borders; to the pressure to provide more personalised public services. In all these areas the challenge is both to be able to use, where appropriate, the opportunities of new technology in pursuit of security or in pursuit of justice — and simultaneously to put in place proper standards and oversight to protect liberty.
The information age has, as Tom Friedman has so well drawn out, flattened hierarchies and potentially increased the power of all citizens. So we should not fear the advent of the information age – and it should not lead us to abandon or fear for our values – but at the same time I believe we require a new and imaginative approach to accountability and to winning people’s trust in the ways in which information is held and used.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t yet ideal. We’re not in a state to export our e-government to Scandinavia, New Zealand, Canada, Holland. But it’s starting to tackle our oft-expressed and deepest concerns. Is Transformational Government about to be transformed for the better? It’s a surprise, and it fels like a good thing.
9 Responses to “PM’s “Liberty” speech starts to tackle our deepest concerns”
But it’s an open secret in the Home Office that The ID System is the only thing left differentiating Labour from the Conservatives.
Not just the ID Card Act, Ian! While we’re at it, let’s lose s12 of the Children Act 2004, and all the other bits of legislation that allow endless streams of children’s personal data to be collected, stored, shared and juggled with, depending on whatever regulations a Secretary of State chooses to make.
I quite accept Ian’s point that starting to say the right things – some of them, at least – is not the same as doing them. And I quite accept Ian and Terri’s point that there’s more we need to question. But hey, isnt extending FoI to PFI contracts and national security strategy and reviewing regulatory controls on data sharing a start? Has the pendulum just changed direction? If that’s the case it’s early to say just where it will end up, but not too early to say (as CFoI has done) that this is a welcome change inn direction.
“inn direction” – now there’s a Freudian slip 😉
I know I’m a miserable old cynic, William, but after ten years (throughout which Brown has been a central figure in govt) I need a lot more than obvious and relatively uncontroversial ‘reform’ before putting the bunting out.
For some reason I keep thinking of Peel, whom the No10 website (funnily enough) hails as a reformer, but others describe along the lines of “thinking more of getting well through a business into which he had been led by circumstances, than bold and decided in his pursuit and assertion of great principles and worthy objects.”
That’s probably enough from Eeyore’s gloomy corner.
The Indy has
Shami Chakrabarti, Liberty’s director, said: “After so many years of relentless political attacks on liberty, it is brave for any Prime Minister to give a speech in its name. He must be aware, however, that this does not sit well with detention without charge and compulsory identity cards. The standards, like the stakes, must now be raised.” A senior Downing Street aide said: “The purpose of this speech is that the British people rightly value the concept of liberty, but… the question is how do we adopt this to the new challenges for the 21st century.” The centrepiece of the reforms is the prospect of a Bill of Rights and Duties promised by Mr Brown within days of taking office, but the Prime Minister’s aides conceded it was still some years off.
Over at CFOI Maurice Frankel says
Maurice Frankel said: “We are extremely pleased that instead of restricting the Act the government is proposing to extend it. The original proposals would have severely undermined the legislation and suggested that the government regretted introducing the FOI Act. Now for the first time we are seeing signs that it is taking pride in it instead.”
Coming just two weeks after the Service Transformation Agreement reiterated deep-laid plans to centralise citizen information and to sweep away all legal barriers to data-sharing for government purposes, I’d say this marks no change of policy direction, but a change of political strategy. He is moving to neutralise those of us who care about liberty and privacy, by appropriating those terms for HMG use and reassigning their meaning to things very unlike.
Remember Charles Clarke on the ID scheme? “ID cards are a means of controlling the Big Brother society rather than creating it. Big Brother society is already here.”
Writing cynically what I expect from GB’s “constitution” is a slight relaxation of the constraints on physical civil rights, whilst further reductions of privacy (under the concept of “if you have nothing to hide…”).
Unfortunately this will probably work as the main media headlines seem to concentrate on the physical aspects (e.g. ID Cards but rarely the NIR, detention centers for immigrants but rarely the nature of SIAC tribunals, etc).
I won’t believe a word Gordon Brown says on this subject until he puts his money where his mouth is and repeals the ID Card Act. Then, let’s talk about privacy, customer-driven e-government and trust.