WRITTEN ON September 2nd, 2008 BY Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Pertinent Art, What do we want?

Sir Bonar writes

It might be helpful, in response to recent regrettable and ill-informed comment in some of the less reputable parts of the news media, if I were to clarify the status and purpose of our child protection database ContactPoint.

Be in no doubt that no-one takes child protection more seriously than I. My wife Euphorbia and I have been Trustees of a highly reputable children’s charity in Bhutan for many decades. Along with Transformation, and of course Customer Insight, child protection is my central passion.

Contrary to recent press reports, the purpose of ContactPoint has not changed. ContactPoint will help improve service delivery to children and young people. It aims to help ensure all children get access to the services and support to which they are entitled, as well as safeguarding vulnerable children. We would not wish to give the impression that the purpose of ContactPoint is to detect crimes – far from it.
 ContactPoint will only hold basic information such as name and contact details. It will not hold any case information such as school achievements, police records or medical records. Such data will be located elsewhere in the data-sharing “ring of astral soup”, each part linked to the ContactPoint record, by wires, as it were, so as to be easily retrievable. This is simple common sense.

It has always been the intention that members of the police would be users of ContactPoint – as set out in Regulations. But this would not be for the purpose of detecting crimes – far from it. Youth justice services are an important part of the support provided to children and young people and it is crucial that all relevant practitioners are part of a multi-agency team working to support a child. Young people who have committed no wrong have nothing to fear from the police.

One can easily envisage circumstances in which a trusty public servant, working alone in the office late at night, felt the urge to go beyond the call of duty and deliver some personalised public services; some additional solace, perhaps, or words of comfort to a particularly vulnerable and needy child. Logging in to Contactpoint using a special 24-digit PIN code, he could see which such children might be available in a certain geographic area, at the touch of a button. The very impressive “gold standard” security measures provided by our trusted service provider Cap Gemini (whom I should thank incidentally for a most entertaining lunch last week) will ensure that such capabilities are never abused.

The Regulations also specify the limited circumstances under which information can be disclosed from ContactPoint – these circumstances were reiterated in the Guidance. I might add that the Regulations were debated in and passed by Parliament in July 2007 and came into force on 1 August 2007.

Anyone desiring that we humble public servants should implement some different expression of the democratic will of the British people is advised to get elected as an MP and campaign for some other course of action.

I’d also like to clear up this misunderstanding about the screening of records of the children of celebrities, senior officials and politicians. Society accepts that these are people with special needs whose privacy must be protected. Owing to a typographical error by a junior staff member (who has since been disciplined) these screening arrangements have been omitted from the launch version of the database. This is a regrettable isolated incident. The main launch has therefore been put back to 2009 but the message we wish to put out is that this is in no sense a delay of any sort, merely a further qualitative improvement to what will be a world-leading flagship children’s database.

No other country is undertaking anything quite so ambitious on such a scale, indeed we’ve already had senior delegations from as far afield as Belgium to admire our world-leading work in centralising and rationalising child protection.

To spell this out in more detail:

The purpose of ContactPoint has not changed. ContactPoint will help improve service delivery to children and young people. It aims to help ensure all children get access to the services and support to which they are entitled – as well as highlighting the wherabouts and specific needs of especially vulnerable children, at whom appropriate services can then be targetted with pinpoint accuracy. 


ContactPoint will provide a quick way to network with other people sharing an interest in the same child, making it easier to provide more coordinated support in a protective environment.


The Regulations provide the legal basis for the operation and establishment of ContactPoint. The Regulations specify the information that can be held on ContactPoint, conditions of access, and the types of practitioners that can have access – this includes those working in youth justice services. 


The Regulations specify the limited circumstances under which information can be disclosed. This includes the provision that the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families or a local authority may disclose information included in the database if he, or it, is satisfied that disclosure is necessary for the purposes of the prevention or detection of crime or the prosecution of offenders. But although Contactpoint is accessible by the police and can be used to prevent crime – inded that is one of its benefits – we would reiterate that the message is that Contactpoint is not in any sense about the prevention of crime. It is capable of preventing crime, indeed that is one of its benefits, but that is not its purpose. I trust that is now clear.

The draft Regulations were subject to formal public consultation from 21 September 2006 to 14 December 2006. The Regulations were debated in and passed by Parliament in July 2007 and came into force on 1 August 2007.

ContactPoint will hold the name, address, gender and date of birth of a child until their 18th birthday, and contact details for their parents and for services working with a child. ContactPoint will NOT contain details of school achievements, police or social services records or subjective opinions about a child or their family. It will simply make those more easily accessile via our astral-soup based data sharing architecture codenamed Saturn, and then rendered into fusion centres for special administrative processing measures.

A recorded involvement with a youth offending team or police is not per se evidence of criminal activity, any more than a public servant working with an abused child is an abuser. Far from it. These teams could be working with a child or family for a number of reasons – they could be victims of domestic violence, part of a missing person’s investigation or subject to a police protection order. There is nothin stigmatising in such an association. In my own experience most children are relatively innocent, just as most people who choose a lifetime of public service do so only for the very highest of motives.

Records can only be retained after a young person’s 18th birthday with their informed, explicit consent and only in limited, specified circumstances set out in Regulations. This is subject to certain derogations set out in the guidance notes. There is an appeals procedure.

In most cases practitioner involvements will only remain on ContactPoint for one year after a practitioner has stopped working with a child. Information will be held in the archive for six years and then deleted, with a backup copy sent via Saturn to our data fusion facility. The only deviation from this procedure will be in in the circumstances set out above and at any time of heightened national security alert.

Children, young people and parents have a right to request to see the data held about them and to challenge any errors. Any such challenge will be recorded on a seperate audit log together with the new data (if any) and the original data, along with the reason for the challenge.

Members of the police have always been intended to be users of ContactPoint. They form an important part of the support provided to children and young people and it is crucial that all relevant practitioners are part of a multi-agency team working to support a child. But, we reiterate, crime prevention shoud play no role in how we present ContactPoint. Any reference to crime prevention in relation to Contactpoint in public fora or the news media – these same news media, I might add, who complain daily about gang-related knife crime – is wholly inappropriate and without merit or foundation.

Not everyone in the police will have access to ContactPoint. There will be a designated list of police officers who are known or suspected to present a danger to children. They will only be allowed to access the database after undergoing a course of counselling and being issued with a new 32-digit PIN. All ContactPoint users will have to state clear reasons in order to gain access to a child’s record and all use of the system will be monitored and audited.

In this manner we hope that the scouge of child crime will be effectively eliminated within half a generation. For that, of course, any price is worth paying. That is the message we must get across to the naysayers.