WRITTEN ON April 5th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Transformational Government, What do we want?

I can’t reveal the identity or affiliation of any participant at the tasty and interesting dinner I attended last night. I believe (under the revised Rule) I can say it was at the House of Lords. I can definitely say there are some very dodgy memes flying around.

One is the notion that we can decline to “buy into” the European legislative framework and case law behind the UK’s data protection act and data sharing plans. The European Convention on Human Rights and Data Protection directive have legal force here. We can’t just dismiss them as Euro-constiutional claptrap, insufficiently pragmatic for us Brits (any more than I can say I think our laws on tax or whatever aren’t quite right and that I don’t really “buy into them”).

Another is a distinct, probably unintended but seriously wrong elitist vibe which suggests it’s intolerable for the media to intrude into the lives of those who run the country, therefore the top 5% need extreme protection from revelations about their private lives. But when conversation turns to hoi polloi people are spoken of as immigrant tax-dodging scroungers of social services and healthcare. Our national situation is one requiring monolithic ID management and a toxic soup of data sharing. Facing the national problems we do a general loss of privacy isn’t a great price to pay.

People who desperately need a giro cheque will give away any amount of personal information to feed the kids. That’s why they need every bit as much statutory and practical privacy protection as anyone else. We’re all in this together. Just as we’re equal in the eyes of the law so too the systems we create must be good enough for one and all of us in how they protect our personal data and leave us in control of our own lives.

By all means put casual service-sector workers in businesses with 125% staff turnover (Rentokil, apparently) on 50% emergency tax rates while the employers and the system works out who they are, and that they haven’t claimed their allowances already.

The other weird meme is this self-repairing bubble of mutual self-congratulation. Reasonable people tell you in all seriousness that everything is fine and that Whitehall generally and the CIO profession in particular is doing a great job. The same people will reel off a list of dire specific shortcomings, whether it’s procurement processes, large government web sites, political interference, Transformational Government, Connecting for Health, DirectGov search. But as fast as they acknowledge specific shortcomings, the bubble of self-belief self-heals. I can’t work that one out. Surely there are some mistaken assumptions underlying this?