“Index to nation’s children” scrapped

Children’s minister Tim Loughton has announced that from noon on 6th August 2010, all access to the ContactPoint database — the centralized index of every child and family in England — will be shut off. The data on ContactPoint systems will be destroyed within two months of the closure [1].

The £224m database, which government research showed could never be made secure [2], would have made the details of every under-18 in the country, along with their parents, school and GP available to over one million people [3]. Contrary to commonly reported estimates that ‘only’ 330,000 people would have access, hundreds of thousands more would have been authorized to access the system under the terms of the Children Act 2004.

NO2ID welcomed the announcement but warned against the introduction of substitute systems by individual local authorities, such as has already occurred in Westminster [4]. A patchwork of such systems, with even fewer constraints and much weaker oversight, might prove to be more dangerous than ContactPoint itself.

Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID [3] said:

“NO2ID applauds the Minister for taking swift, decisive action. Disposing of what would have been an index to the nation’s children is a good start. Stamping out the official obsession with collection and passing around of sensitive personal details may prove somewhat more difficult.

“ContactPoint was the very opposite of what a child protection system should be: insecure, unsafe and applied indiscriminately to millions when the resources would have been better spent tackling the very real problems of the vulnerable few.”

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1. Written statement by Parliamentary Under Secretary for Children & Families,
   Tim Loughton MP: http://www.education.gov.uk/news/news/~/media/Files/lacuna/news/Decommissioning%20ContactPoint%20WMS%2022%20July%202010v3.ashx
2. The official Deloitte report states “there will always be a risk of data security incidents occurring” (p4) and goes on to identify “a significant risk” (p5) from the self-certified security procedures of local councils and other organisations accessing the database:
   http://www.parliament.uk/deposits/depositedpapers/2008/DEP2008-0502.pdf
3. ‘UK’s ’secure’ child protection database will be open to one million’, The
   Register, 12/11/08:
   http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/12/contactpoint_figures_analysis/
4. ‘Westminster replaces Contactpoint with local Children’s Hub’,
   ComputerWeekly, 14/6/10:
   http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/06/14/241580/Westminster-replaces-Contactpoint-with-local-Children39s.htm
5. NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database
   state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate for a list of ‘database state’ initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing, and http://www.no2id.net/datasharing for how it all fits together.

For immediate or future interview, please call:

• Phil Booth (National Coordinator, national.coordinator at no2id.net) on 07974 230
  839
• Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary at no2id.net) on 07956 544 308
• Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer at no2id.net) on 07773 376 166

Responding to a freedom of information request from a member of the public [1], the National Policing Improvement Agency [2] has just revealed that a national police database currently holds records of 7,600,000,000 occasions on which the locations of motor vehicles cars have been automatically logged. The £500 million a year quango, which operates the National ANPR Data Centre (NADC), was answering questions put by blogger ‘HMP Britain’.

The information is collated from information taken from roadside cameras by police forces around the UK — 4,045 of them in the first full week of June, according to the same document — although the Association of Chief Police Officers earlier this year suggested there were over 10,000 cameras in active use [3]. Many such cameras also keep photographs of the driver and passenger of each passing car, though those are not collected centrally at the NADC.

Guy Herbert, General Secretary of NO2ID said:

“There is nothing wrong, necessarily, with an automated system looking out for specific wanted vehicles in a way a human officer can’t manage. But routine recording of where you’ve been and who you were with was used to intimidate dissidents in a police-state. It is the activity of stalkers, industrialised by database.”

-ENDS-

Notes:

1. Freedom of Information request on ‘Size and Scope of the National ANPR Data Centre’s Database’: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/size_and_scope_of_the_national_a
2. See http://www.npia.police.uk
3. See ‘The ANPR secret’, Kable, 3rd February 2010:http://www.kable.co.uk/automatic-numberplate-recognition-police-anpr-gc-feb10
4. NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate for a list of ‘database state’ initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing.

For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please contact:

• Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net) on 07974 230 839
• Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308
• Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166

26 million “kept in the dark” as ministry prepares to seize their medical records

The author of an independent review of the NHS Summary Care Record (SCR) due to be published tomorrow, Thursday 17th June, has said that 88% of patients who had received letters about SCRs had either “thrown them away unread or could not remember receiving them” [1]. Up to 26 million people could not know that they were losing their one chance to make an important privacy choice.

In the months immediately before the general election, the Department of Health spent £7.5 million ‘incentivising’ Primary Care Trusts to send nearly 30 million propaganda letters to the public informing them of ‘Changes to your health records’ [2]. Those who do not respond to that letter by obtaining, completing, and delivering to their doctor a separate opt-out form are taken to have given irrevocable consent for their personal health details to be uploaded and shared through the centralised system. (Once viewed, one’s record would never be deleted.)

Despite the coalition’s agreement that:

“We will put patients in charge of making decisions about their care, including control of their health records”

new Health Minister Simon Burns recently announced in a buried Parliamentary answer [3] that the upload will go ahead.

In an attempt to influence a critical vote by GPs on withdrawing support for the SCR programme [4], Burns sent a letter to the BMA [5], promising yet another ‘review’ but offering no commitment to significant change.

Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID [6] said:

“Independent research indicates that 26 million people had no idea that one item of colourful junk mail was their only official warning of massive changes to
their families’ medical privacy. They have been kept in the dark, and have no real choice. They may not even find out until it is too late.

“This is not a mistake. It is deliberate abuse. Yet ministers who say they’ll put patients in control are happy to let it continue. Uploads must stop now.”

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1. In a panel debate on 15th June, Professor Trisha Greenhalgh is reported as saying: “…opt out rates were affected by the fact that, according to one piece
   of research, 88% of patients who had received letters about SCRs had either thrown them away unread or could not remember receiving them. A 0.6% opt out
   rate has to be interpreted in the light of those wider findings.” http://www.smarthealthcare.com/trisha-greenhalgh-summary-care-records-problematic-15jun10
   Highlights of a draft of tomorrow’s confidential UCL report can be read here: http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/tony_collins/2010/06/highlights-of-confidential-ucl.html
2. See, e.g. ‘Race to kill off care record’, PULSE, 18th May 2010:http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=19&storycode=4126050&c=2
   . And compare Connecting for Health statements that there have been no change to the “rate of activity” over SCRs –http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/30/scr_review_call/ – with the graph at the bottom of its own page on ‘Key statistics for Summary Care Records’, which shows that around 27 million letters were sent from late January 2010 to the end of April 2010: http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/scr/staff/aboutscr/benefits/scrkey
3. See NO2ID’s press release, 6th June 2010: /2010-06/capitulation-to-nhs-bureaucrats-threatens-medical-privacy-of-millions/
4. See ‘Government to review Summary Care Record rollout’, PULSE, 11th June 2010: http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=35&storycode=4126279&c=2
5. Copy of Simon Burns’ letter to the head of the BMA and Chair of the GP Committee, read out to GPs just before a critical vote on withdrawing support for SCR on 11th June 2010: http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/Journals/Medical/Pulse/2010_June_16/attachments/POC4_511760%20Dr%20Hamish%20Meldrum%20&%20Dr%20Laurence%20Buckman.pdf
6. NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate for a list of ‘database state’ initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing, and http://www.no2id.net/datasharing for how it all fits together.
   In 2006, NO2ID helped launch the NHS Confidentiality campaign http://www.nhsconfidentiality.org, which won the right for patients to opt out of the Summary Care Record.
   For an overview of why Summary Care Records represent a threat to medical confidentiality, individuals’ and the public health, see: http://www.no2id.net/downloads/SCR_bad_idea.pdf

For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please contact:

• Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net) on 07974 230 839
• Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308
• Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166

Phil Booth will be in central London tomorrow, and available for interview on the launch of the UCL report.