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At first sight, Lord Laming's recommendation that the government should investigate setting up a database of every child in the country seems eminently sensible.

He argues that, with a highly mobile population, changes in traditional family structures and an increasing number of homeless families, there is a greater risk of children such as Victoria Climbie slipping through the net" and disappearing from the view of professionals. This danger is exacerbated because, as he puts it "those who deliberately harm children have a tendency to cover their tracks. Poor record-keeping, doubts about the exchange of information between services, and inadequate client information systems make [losing contact with children] easy."

The database Laming proposes would contain basic information about children and families: record of a child's date of birth, their primary carer, their address, their GP and the school they attend. According to Laming's vision: "Every child would be registered shortly after birth, or upon arrival in this country, and then tracked throughout their childhood."

This information would be accessible to all agencies involved in protecting children. Professionals - whether police, social services, health or education - would be able to log on to the database, type in a child's or family's name, and see where they have come from, what involvement with services they have had in the past, and whether there are, or have been, any concerns.

Most front-line staff say that such a database is, in theory, a grand idea. Information sharing between agencies - the main failure identified in nearly every investigation into a child's death - would happen automatically, without the need for phone calls, letters and e-mails flying in all directions. Abusers would find it impossible to arrive at a succession of different A&E departments in the hope the pattern would not be spotted, while concerns about a family couldn't disappear abruptly the moment they moved across a council boundary.

But, as Laming acknowledges in his report, a simple idea can be fiendishly difficult to put into practice. Every front-line worker asked by Community Care said "great idea" followed invariably by "but who would be responsible for inputting the data?" Given the paperwork overload that many staff already face, a national database requiring prompt updating for every case a social worker had would add yet another administrative burden. The database would also have to run alongside local records and so staff would have to input many of the same details twice.

Furthermore, a database is only as good as the people using it, and statutory services' record-keeping skills have often been found wanting. In 2000, auditors found 86 per cent of the information on the police national computer contained errors, ranging from the trivial to the highly serious. And during the Victoria Climbi' Inquiry a child protection team administrator memorably described the record-keeping chaos in his department, saying that retrieving the right child protection case file was "like trying to win the National Lottery". The chances of a multitude of agencies and individuals using consistently identical methods to update the database seem slim, while human error such as entering a surname or date of birth incorrectly could render the whole process worthless.

This is assuming people can get into the database in the first place. With hundreds of different non-communicating IT systems in use across country, finding a way of making a database accessible to everyone who needs it may well prove either impossible or prohibitively expensive. A web-based system would seem the obvious choice, but internet access is not universal and can be problematic. Governments also have a difficult time with national IT projects - the Criminal Records Bureau and Child Support Agency are two examples where IT problems have led to delays and chaos but there have been many others.

Even if the massive initial IT programme and running costs were accepted by the government, there are questions about whether families would accept this intrusion into their privacy. The Connexions service, for instance, ran into trouble recently because of the information personal advisers collect about teenagers - including information about sexual activity or drug use, which could in some circumstances be shared with police, health and social services.


While no one would argue that abusive adults should be able to hide behind the data protection legislation, many people question whether a record of every one of the 11.1 million children in England is really necessary - particularly since the nature of the information collected could be extremely sensitive. Would a family who had needed support when their child was five years old really want the police, health and education authorities to be able to find out all about it at the click of a button 10 years later? And when would the information be deleted?

Roger Bingham is public relations director for civil rights charity, Liberty. He says the charity would be alarmed by the implications of such a database. He says: "The first question would be why we would need a national database of all children when the problem could be addressed by a database of children at risk, or who are in contact with local services."

There is also the danger that a national database could be abused by people with ulterior motives. "Unfortunately, wherever you collect that amount of detailed information together you create risks for those people," he says. "Under the spirit of the Data Protection Act you should only collect the information you absolutely need on people, only those who have a real need for the information should be able to access it, and it should be destroyed immediately when no longer needed."

Catherine Watkins, team manager of a child and family assessment team at West Sussex Council, recognises the benefits a database could bring but is concerned that it might lead agencies to stop talking to one another. "To be able to put a child's name and date of birth into a computer and get all the information about them would be useful and it would certainly make it much harder for someone who was trying to hide something. But it could cause more problems than it solves. A lot of the time there's simply no substitute for talking to someone about a child, getting a feel for the situation. The database might simply enable individual agencies to act without talking to each other or working co-operatively."

Whether the government opts for the feasibility study that Laming has called for remains to be seen - the Department of Health refuses to say anything other than that the idea is under consideration. But it is to be hoped that, before another national scheme is rolled out, someone attends to the devil in the detail.

Laming's database recommendation   

The government should explore the benefit to children of setting up and operating a national children's database on all children under the age of 16. A feasibility study should be a prelude to a pilot study to explore its usefulness in strengthening the safeguards for children.   Justifying the proposal Laming said: "The benefit of such a database would be that every new contact with a child by a member of staff from any of the key services would initiate an entry that would build up a picture of the child's health, developmental and educational needs."   Source: Victoria Climbie Report, 2003