What happens with the data you give various offices of government? How is it used?
The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust have published a report into the "Database State", questioning the legality of some of the databases held by government on us, the use of the data and how data is collected. Click here for the report.
You maybe also interested in the story below concerning some new changes.
SPECIAL REPORTS
The UK is now a surveillance society
By Ken Craggs
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 29, 2009, 00:20
Since 1996, the United Kingdom Audit Commission has run the National Fraud Initiative (NFI), an exercise that matches electronic data within and between audited bodies, apparently to prevent and detect fraud.
Next month, local authorities (councils) in the UK will again be giving details about citizens to the Audit Commission. Personal details are handed over if a citizen pays Council Tax, claims Housing Benefit, lives in a council’s property, is disabled and has a travel pass, residents’ parking permit, or a blue badge; has a licence for market trading, market operating, taxi driving or a personal licence to sell alcohol.
The Audit Commission then crosschecks the information with information that other public bodies have about citizens. These public bodies include the National Health Service, other local authorities, government departments, Age Concern, Council of Mortgage Lenders, National Association of Pension Funds, Trades Union Congress (TUC), UNISON, Passenger Transport Authorities, Police Authorities, Fire and Rescue Authorities, National Park Authorities, Waste Authorities, and non-government organisations, such as pension schemes and housing associations.
The use of data by the Audit Commission in a data matching exercise is carried out with statutory authority under its powers in Part 2A of the Audit Commission Act 1998 and does not require the consent of the individuals concerned under the Data Protection Act 1998.
The national Customer Relationship Management project (CRM), which was launched by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2003, has led to councils integrating personal data such as council tax, housing and electoral register information on one system.
The Database State report warns that the development of integrated databases and the joining-up of existing data “raises the possibility of information being available in new ways, without the citizen being properly informed about them, and to council and other staff to whom it was previously not available.” The authors added that two-thirds of the population no longer trust the government with their personal data. The report also claims that 11 databases, including the National DNA Database, the National Identity Register and the Department for Work and Pensions cross departmental data sharing programme are illegal under human rights or data protection rules.
During the investigation of minor offences, UK local authorities are continuing to illegally spy on individuals, said the chief surveillance commissioner in a report published in July 2009. Sir Christopher Rose said it was of “significant concern” that councils conducted covert surveillance of individuals for non-criminal offences -- an action banned under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).
According to a report by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, also published in July 2009, requests by the police and other officials for information on people’s phone calls and e-mails averaged 1,381 a day between 01 January 2008 and 31 December 2008. A total of 504,073 surveillance requests to telephone and Internet companies were made in 2008. The report states that most requests came from the police and that there were also requests from the intelligence services and local authorities.
Local authorities in the UK have used RIPA laws to investigate dog-fouling, spy on workers who claimed to be sick, monitor the misuse of disabled parking badges, investigate fly-tipping, and to check if residents were putting their rubbish out on the wrong day.
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It's time to make local service providers accountable to citizens and parliament, not to the government of the day, says Sam Talbot Rice
If the past 12 years have taught us anything it is that vast spending increases coupled with centralised command and control-style management do not achieve improvements proportionate to the cost nor do they bring greater satisfaction among taxpayers.
After all, we can hardly be satisfied with a system that has given us falling productivity in the health service, despite a doubling in the NHS annual budget. Or with a school system that costs £50bn a year but leaves one in five 11-year-olds without basic literacy and numeracy skills. Meanwhile our police, suffocating under the weight of red tape, spend the equivalent of fewer than two hours per 12-hour shift on patrol.
A Centre for Policy Studies report 'Freedom for Public Services', examines the delivery structures in health, education, policing and local government and calls for the current spider's web of centrally imposed targets, regulations, quangos and guidance to be replaced with a system of proper local and Parliamentary accountability.
Authors William Mason and Jonathan McMahon argue that we need to transfer accountability for, and control of, public services to the local level – allowing the professionals to do their jobs and local communities to hold them properly accountable through the ballot box. Clearly, there still needs to be a system of rigorous and expert central government inspection, not least in providing comparative information for taxpayers. But that system should be accountable to Parliament, rather than the government of the day. In so doing, they conservatively estimate potential savings to be £15bn a year.
Of course we should not be under any illusion about the difficulty of shifting our political culture away from central control. After all, whenever a crisis breaks, ministers are hauled onto the Today programme or to the dispatch box to be asked what they are going to do about it.
Notwithstanding the difficulties of reform, the report outlines the key principles needed to wean us off our centralising drip:
• Decisions made by professionals on the spot tend to be better than those mandated from afar
• Central government targets should be reduced, as should central involvement in the provision of local services
• The nature of public sector regulation should be reversed so that it addresses the causes of problems rather than regulating the consequences of failure
• Barriers to entry in public service provision should be reduced so that competition fosters innovation
• Local citizens should have the information and ability to challenge those who provide public services.
So far, we have heard the language of personalisation of public services, but have not seen the reality. Rather than devolving power and choice, ministers have set upon a course of transformational government that seeks to collect, in the words of their adviser, "a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights". This path to a database state is both hugely expensive and liable to spectacular breaches of security. It is also wrong in principle, as it tips the balance of power between state and citizen overwhelmingly towards the former.
If we are going to move into what David Cameron has termed the post-bureaucratic age we will need to think not just in terms of the percentage of GDP spent by the state, but also about the fundamental balance in the relationships of government, the individual, communities and businesses.
The idea that Whitehall knows best has been under attack for many years, but it is only now that we have the tools to achieve the much-promised, but rarely delivered, decentralisation of power. Indeed, true localism – with proper local accountability – will only be possible if voters have access to the information, whether it is crime maps or hospital infection rates, they need to make meaningful choices and hold those in power to account.
Sam Talbot Rice is research director at the Centre for Policy Studies
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