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Invasion of privacy and putting too much faith in IT systems are among criticisms of the government’s desire to identify, refer and track children. Ruth Winchester reports.

How much information does the state have about you? Your name, date of birth and marital status. Probably your address, what sort of home you live in and who you live with. Whether you’re a wage earner or on benefits, plus a few other bits and pieces, depending on your contact with services.

Under almost all circumstances, the Data Protection Act 1998 protects you from having your personal information used against your wishes. But elements in the green paper on children at risk suggest that the government is committed to a major change in the concept of family privacy.

As Trojan horses go, the government’s identification, referral and tracking system is not particularly well camouflaged. It clearly aims to identify young children with problems, refer them to preventive services and track them through to adulthood. And given the belief that early support for children and their families can prevent serious problems a few years down the line, these are very hard aims to disagree with.

But contained within the body of this proposal are a host of implications that could permanently change the relationship between the family and the state. Essentially, what the green paper proposes is this: every child in the UK will be registered on a locally held database. They would be identified with a number unique to them, possibly their NHS number. Information would include their name, address and date of birth, their GP and school, and a “flag” stating whether the child is known to agencies. A range of agencies (the green paper envisages at least 13 separate bodies) would be able to access and amend this database.

So far, so complicated. Even a straightforward list of children’s details raises enormous privacy issues. But crucially, the government is consulting on whether “warning signs within the family”, such as a parent’s, carer’s or sibling’s imprisonment, domestic violence, mental health or substance misuse problems should also be added to a child’s record and shared among all those agencies.

Effectively, the government proposes that a child’s record should become a family record, accessible to the police, health authority, housing body, and local council – even to voluntary organisations and school support staff.

Fraught with difficulty

As the situation stands at present, sharing information is fraught with difficulty and laden with question marks about when it is legally sound and morally acceptable to share sensitive and private information without a parent or child’s consent, and when it is not. Some agencies share information routinely, and others only when a child is at serious risk.

So what does the government want to do about it? In the green paper, it says it wants “to prevent situations where a child does not receive the help they need because of too rigid an interpretation of the privacy of the child and their family”. It also says it will “legislate at the first opportunity to enable information-sharing to happen at an earlier stage to prevent problems escalating”. This implies amending the Data Protection Act 1998 to give a wide range of professionals the power to overrule families’ right to privacy, as long as it is in the interests of protecting their children’s welfare.

Many people are alarmed at the government’s plans, not least because they run the risk of driving problems further underground. Terri Dowty is a policy adviser for Children’s Rights Alliance for England and has written a paper on the data protection implications of the government’s plans. She says: “It will give people one more reason not to ask for help. If I was worried that my husband was drinking too much, and I wanted to discuss it with my GP, I’d have to accept that a social worker might be on my doorstep the following morning.”

Even if the law is changed to make information-sharing easier, the “information hub” proposals are fraught with difficulty. The state has a dismal record with big IT projects, and this could be the most complex yet. Running a “parallel” system alongside all the existing records kept by individual agencies would involve duplication of effort, and the scope for human error – spelling mistakes, adding data to the wrong record, or deleting a child – is enormous.

Lists of children’s names, addresses and level of vulnerability are also open to abuse. Says Dowty: “We are piloting something that is inherently unsafe. The more information a database holds, the more unreliable it becomes, and the more people who have access to it, the more unsafe it becomes.”

Will it protect children?

Others question whether such a system would protect children at all. For Natalie Cronin, a policy adviser for the NSPCC,  “there’s a danger that people will see it as a panacea – that once they’ve put a flag on a child’s record that is the job done. Would the IRT money be better spent getting more people working in child protection?”

Dowty agrees: “Where an electronic flagging system is used, there is a significant danger that the duty of care is, in practice, handed over to the computer system. People become utterly reliant on it, so that if the system isn’t pinging something up then there can’t be anything wrong. Safer would be to replace the 2,000 child protection workers we are missing. There is no substitute for professional judgement.”

Despite these misgivings, there are now 10 IRT pilots running across England. Each of the trailblazers has been given about £1m to set up, appoint staff, learn the lessons, get an IT system started and pass on the necessary learning to other authorities. These pilots are expected to produce results by summer 2004. According to one IRT project manager: “It’s long enough to identify most of the problems, but not find many of the answers.”

John Coughlan is social services director for Telford and Wrekin Council, which is one of the IRT pilots. The authority and its partners have been working on a system called Aware which is now part of their IRT project. Over the past three years many of the system’s problems have been overcome.

He describes himself as an IRT enthusiast, but acknowledges that the practical and ethical issues are complex. “The length of time we’ve taken to produce a manageable, accessible system is a measure of how difficult it is to do.” There are issues around management of expectations too, he adds. “If you put someone on the system or flag them up, what do you expect to happen? IRT should have been called IRIT – identification, referral, intervention and tracking. Otherwise, so what? What are we identifying and referring people for? Most of our resources are sucked into the cases at the extreme end of the spectrum. If we start to identify families early, what do we stop doing so we can focus resources on them?”

But Coughlan remains enthusiastic about IRT “because it is hugely important. We’ve got an army of dedicated workers in  different agencies, all working hard to safeguard children, often despite legislative and resource restrictions. If IRT is a way of assisting these staff, even if it is hugely complex, then it does represent progress.”

The question has to be whether the price of progress – the loss of real privacy for every family – is worth paying.