WRITTEN ON November 26th, 2008 BY Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

Sir Bonar writes

Here’s an example of the sort of tricky issue one is confronted with, where one’s experience is enough to nip a nasty little problem in the bud. My colleagues at MoJ had been working ona response to the Thomas-Walport recommedations about data sharing.

Mark is a smart cookie of course, and we’re all behind his efforts to secure more data for medical research purposes. Richard is a good egg. He has to throw the odd soundbite to the news media from time to time to make a show of independence but at heart he’s as pragmatic about this stuff as the rest of us.

But look at this paragraph about European data protection law the clueless nitwits MoJ had drafted:

It should be pointed out that the present UK Act falls some way short of what is required of us under European Data Protection law. This creates a difficult situation in which a number of our Transformational Government systems for health and children are technically illegal. This could result in major systems reengineering, and revisions to long-term contracts with considerable expense to the UK taxpayer. We therefore recommend that vigorous efforts to into realigning future European law with our current data sharing practice in the UK.

I despair of Suningdale nowadays. What do they teach them? I seized my encrypted dictaphone and fired off an email for Patricia to send down to the Blackberry girls for typing. It read as follows:

Rec 6; delete para 2. Replace with The Government is committed to ensuring that European data protection instruments continue to meet the high expectations of UK citizens, and will work to ensure that UK and European law remains properly equipped to deal with challenges brought by technological and social change.

That’s all anyone needs to know. I’m jolly glad to see they used my draft in the final version. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour. We’ve still got a couple of years to sort this out in Brussels.