Police to get access to national child database

27 Aug 2008

Police are to be given access to the Government’s new children’s database, in order to search for evidence of criminal activity.

The Government confirmed last night that police would be able to apply for access to the system, which was originally conceived as a means to help protect every child in England from the risk of harm or abuse.

However, in a move likely to dismay privacy campaigners, police will be able to request archived data for a number of reasons, such as “the prevention or detection of crime” and “the prosecution of offenders”.

The £224m ContactPoint system, being developed by CapGemini, is due to launch this autumn. The system will hold data on all children under 18 in England.

The national children’s database was conceived after the Victoria Climbie case to allow social workers, schools, GPs and other professionals to share information if they suspect a child is in danger.

The mandatory national database will include children's names, their ages and addresses, plus details of their parents, schools, GP and social workers.

The database will also include demographic data from the national NHS Spine personal demographic record. A Connecting for Health spokesperson told E-Health Insider this would not include any clinical information and be limited to demographic details.

The government says the system will not include case information on children but will detail whether they have contact with a Youth Offending Team or other services such as drug rehabilitation.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families told the Times newspaper: “To access ContactPoint for the purposes of prevention or detection of crime or for the prosecution of offenders, police would have to make a special request directly to the Secretary of State or the local authority.”

The government says it will connect the different services dealing with children to allow police, council staff, head teachers, doctors and care and probation workers to more easily see if a child is at risk.

ContactPoint records will be updated until children turn 18 then kept in an archive for six years before being destroyed, meaning they can be accessed until a young person reaches 24. Those who have learning difficulties or who are in care will remain on the live system until they turn 25, so their archived records will be available into their 30s.

The government’s decision to press ahead with ContactPoint comes despite a November 2007 report it commissioned from Deloite and Touche that identified a “significant risk” to the system due to differing security procedures from organisations who will access the data.

The review was commissioned following the November 2007 security failure by HM Revenue and Customs (HRMC) on child benefit data.

Reader's Comments

Big Opt in anyone?

27 Aug 08 12:33

This 'minor' expansion of scope of the child database is announced during parliamentary recess. This is frankly sinister.

To extend earlier debates on a topic closer to many of our hearts - do people eager to 'opt in' to CfH Summary Care Records feel confident that open season for law enforcement agencies and local authority snoopers will not be declared there also?

Conservative MP opts-out of SCR:

http://tinyurl.com/5nusuq

Health bodies could access communication logs:

http://tinyurl.com/6h63ex

Anything you say to your health care professional may be used as evidence against you?

Police Access

27 Aug 08 13:26

Wonder which database will be next.............?

http://tinyurl.com/638up6

Big Opt in

27 Aug 08 16:27

Is anyone seriously "opting in" ?

By that, I mean actually writing to their GP and actively asking for their records to be uploaded ?

RE: Big Opt in anyone?

stressfreedave@hotmail.com

27 Aug 08 17:56

This is not an opt in or opt out system, children and the their families have no choice but to allow their confidential data to be shared and accessed. With the police and others being allowed more and more access to more databaseses it is easy to see how easy it will be for anonymous data from one database to be compared to identifiable data to show who the anonymous sata belongs to.

I fail to see why anyone would be suprised at this move considering the goverments and health profession recent history about doing away with confidentality and their determination to share as much data as they demand with who ever they want.

The patient-doctor relationship is slowly being strangled

28 Aug 08 10:30

With the inevitable extension of police/security services, local authorities, and 'billy bob' snooping of our nationalised health records, the ability of patients to trust anybody with sensitive information is quickly disappearing.

This government has it's grubby mits securely placed around the throat of the patient-doctor relationship and is slowly strangling it to death.

It will be too late when the general population realise that the reason of 'treatment in Birmingham while living in Newcastle' was never the reason at all. Treatment outside a 30 mile radius of your home is less than 3% of healthcare activity after all!!

Maybe we are in the lunatic fringe of privacy fascists, but I feel disappointingly smug as each of the predictions come true with time.

Maybe we bring more heat than light to discussions, but heat can bend and shape the hardest of materials into the most amazing products.

Maybe the general public don't share our fanatical fears, but it will be too late when they see we are correct in our predictions.

And nobody in government can provide an assurance that this data will not be lost, misplaced, or abused. Not today, not tomorrow. Never!

It's not that technology is bad. It's how it is being architectured and the reasons behind that architecture.

Stalin would be proud

29 Aug 08 08:20

Why not?

The Police have access to almost every other record these days, so this is a forgone conclusion.

Josef would be proud

Clarification from Connecting for Health

29 Aug 08 10:07

To clarify, police will not have automatic access to patient's Summary Care Records (SCRs), and no details from the SCR will be available on ContactPoint.

ContactPoint does not contain any clinical information at all. It is a directory containing contact details for lead professionals involved with a child's care, including GPs and those providing other types of services.

Connecting for Health spokesperson - posted by EHI

re: Clarification from Connecting for Health

29 Aug 08 11:12

With respect, this requires more than an anonymous posting to EHI to restore confidence. Might I suggest a statement by the Secretary of State for Health followed by legislation enshrining electronic medical record confidentiality.

>>police will not have automatic access to patient's Summary Care Records<<

They didn't apparently have access to ContactPoint until this was quietly announced last week without apparent recourse to parliament.

>>police will not have automatic access [?!]<<

So please could you describe the Governance processes around the police's non-automatic access to NCRS.

>>To access ContactPoint for the purposes of prevention or detection of crime or for the prosecution of offenders, police would have to make a special request directly to the Secretary of State or Local Authority and make a case for disclosure<<

Independent judicial review should be required prior to access - this power must not be in the hands of populist politicians or hundreds of thousands of anonymous civil servants.

>>ContactPoint does not contain any clinical information at all. It is a directory containing contact details for lead professionals involved with a child's care<<

The "no clinical information" mantra is only mouthed when all other mitigation of insecurity / lack of confidentiality fails. The list of involved professionals gives the police all they need to inform (or rather prejudice) any enquiry -

"She's being seen by Dr Mc Methadone. We've got a wrong 'un here!"

Police Access

29 Aug 08 12:35

Ben Bradshaw confirmed that data on the NHS Database will be made available to police where there is an “overriding public interest”.

The disclosure about possible police access to data in electronic health records was prompted by a question from Conservative MP Jeremy Wright. He asked the Secretary of State for Health “whether it will be lawful for the secondary users database to be searched at the request of the police and for the police to be provided with the identity of individuals whose medical records contain specific information”.

Ben Bradshaw replied:

“Data from the secondary uses service will only be disclosed to the police where it is in the overriding public interest, for example to prevent, or support detection of, extremely serious crimes, where there is statutory authority, or where the courts have made an order requiring disclosure.”

The police do not have to approach the courts to access this data, they just have to get the SoS for Health to rubber stamp that it is "in the public interest" to access it.

Just like ContactPoint.

Moving in a totalitarian direction ...

29 Aug 08 13:43

Thinking of the origins of the National Programme, I wonder if it's just a coincidence that George Orwell's real name was Blair?

police access to patient records

31 Aug 08 14:27

Police are already getting access to hospital records to look for signs of domestic abuse. It is only one step on to look for signs of drug abuse as a precursor to domestic abuse... And if a drug addict feels that turning up at a hospital is going to put their records in the hands of the police, they are just going to go untreated.....

losing the plot

01 Sep 08 12:58

ContactPoint was set up in response to a particularly gruesome case, one of the features of which was that the murderously abusive guardians of a little girl managed to evade suspicion by contacting multiple agencies. So this database was suggested to track those contacts

I dont know about anyone else, but was EXPECTING the police to be able to use this information so that if child abuse was suspected in one agency then others who have contact with the same child could be contacted by police and social services so that that child can be protected. It might surprise people on this site to learn that that is the job these people are paid to do and personally i am grateful that on the whole they do it pretty well.

I have no idea whether this particular database is well designed or not, or whether the appropriate safeguards are in place or not, or even if it will ever work, but i wish we were having a debate about these things and not disappearing off into orwellian fantasyland.

at the end of the day privacy is a very important consideration, but it is NOT the only one

Hard cases make bad databases

01 Sep 08 15:25

The Regulatory and Investigatory Powers Act is a dismal precedent...

"the overall number of requests for communications data ... totalled 253,557 during the .. period [11 April 2006 to 31 December 2006.]" from Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner for 2006

http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc0708/hc02/0252/0252.asp

If these requests were all issued for "major threats", child protection and terrorism then we are in worse shape than the Daily Mail suggests.

Who is paying for people to submit and process these requests (900 per day)? Never mind the expense of the technical infrastructure!

Might not just about any practical child welfare project give better value for money than ContactPoint (down to and probably including reintroduction of free school milk)?

It is highly questionable whether emotionally charged tragedies such as Sowham, Shipman, Cilimbie or 7/11 will be prevented by the saturation monitoring of the demographics, movements, medical record, web surfing proclivities and DNA and of every citizen in this country that is underway.

What is unquestionable is the financial cost of these databases - even if they are 100% successful it will cost of tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds per life saved.

Meanwhile NICE value a year of high quality life saved by the NHS somewhere between 20 and 80,000 pounds e.g. http://www.newstatesman.com/health/2008/08/life-nice-treatment-nhs-health

Do the maths - because it seems our Leaders cannot.

Worse yet IMO is the assumption of guilt inherent in all these databases. Innocent people will suffer intrusion, struggle to get innaccurate data changed and have to justify themselves when the inquisitors come knocking. A few will have their families and careers destroyed in the process of proving their innocence - if they can.

We must question the Political wisdom and motivation behind these projects.

Dr Malcolm H Duncan

Phishing Trips?

04 Sep 08 15:46

I have a long-held theory that the current extendable "truncheon" used by the police is, in fact, a fishing rod.