WRITTEN ON March 21st, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

Terri at ARCH spots this piece in the Yorkshire Post

TWO major security glitches in a Government database of 11 million English children have raised fears that the most vulnerable are being put at risk. A third of England’s 150 local authorities did not sign off on the first phase of ContactPoint scheme by the planned date of March 13 and staff say faults with the £224m system place both children and social workers at serious risk.

ContactPoint was set up in 2003 after Lord Laming’s report into the death of Victoria Climbie and stores every child’s address, medical and school details for use by staff in education, health, social care, youth justice and the voluntary sector.

In January, around 300 council workers began “shielding” details of an estimated 55,000 children, including children fleeing abusive homes and those of celebrities and politicians.

But some staff were alarmed to discover adopted children are listed by both their original and their adopted surnames, allowing them to be tracked down by their birth parents.

Checks revealed unprotected duplicates had been generated automatically from central government data. In one council, a vulnerable child’s record was duplicated six times.

Liberal Democrat shadow minister for children Annette Brooke called it “a bombshell”.

She said: “It is deeply concerning that after taking so long to roll the system out, the Government has still failed to spot these major problems.

“If children have been removed from abusive homes they should be kept entirely safe from being traced. We cannot have some of our most vulnerable children being put at risk in this way.

“This is an absolute bombshell and confirms all of our worst fears. The roll out of this flawed database now needs to be stopped.”

The Department of Children, Schools and Families had hoped to get the database running in 17 “early adopter” authorities in March, but the project has now been held up until all councils sign up to the shielding process.

The department has halted the automatic flow of data into ContactPoint from central Government, such as the school census and the child benefit database, until they can be sure no more unprotected duplicates will be created. A spokeswoman said the database will not be brought into full use until the problems have been resolved…

It makes me sad that the people behind ContactPoint have always been convinced they’re doing a good and compassionate thing. But they’s too entrenched in groupthink (disciplinary offence to question the policy etc) to take on board why what they’re doing is ill-advised and in all likelihood illegal. So they spend our money and trample arrogantly on our rights and expectations with a smug self-certainty which people with less self-control than IdealGovernment thinkers might find irritating.

Wibbi we applied formal processes of service design and took on board next-generation thinking on privacy-enhancing and customer-friendly technical architectures before laying down the broad design to information age public services. It’s not a case of “it’s too late now”. More a case of “high time we started to get this right” and we’will have to undo much of what has been done to date, ill-advisedly and at great expense.

Beacons of hope: appointment next week of new director of digital engagement. The work generally of Tom Watson. New information commissioner. Progress on the VRM work. Progress from Liberty Alliance and Microsoft. Plain bloody-minded common sense of British people which will prevail in the end. Please can we sort this out quickly so when climate change really hits at least the relationship between people and state is on a good footing…