Choosing data protection over child protection

ContactPoint, a £224 million government database containing records of all UK children, will be switched off at noon today.

One of the boldest moves made so far by the new Coalition Government in its first 100 days of power, the decision to scrap Labour’s ambitious child protection initiative is being greeted with a mixture of applause and despair.

While advocates, and the government, claim the costly IT scheme is redundant and badly maintained by social services, the real issue to promote its disbandment is data protection. And with the names, ages and addresses of 11 million under-18s ( not to mention their parents’ and doctors’ details) , available to hundreds of thousands of teachers, police officers and social workers at the click of a button, you can hardly blame them.

Children’s minister Tim Loughton said on this morning’s Today Programme that it was “a civil liberties issue.” He  called ContactPoint  “a surrogate ID card scheme for children by the back door, and we just don’t think it’s necessary.” But, however important this data protection issue, scrapping the database without presenting an immediate alternative – or even plans for an eventual solution–, clearly puts demands for privacy protection before child protection.

ContactPoint, which was only implemented in 2009, was brought into being by the Labour government as a result of the miscommunication between social workers, teachers and police highlighted by the abuse and murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie at the hands of her aunt and uncle in 2000.

Haringey, the London borough where Victoria lived for a year until her death, was later the subject of further public outrage and condemnation for the services it provides, following the death of another child, “Baby Peter”, at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend in August 2009.

At the trials of both murders, Haringey services were heavily criticised. In the Climbie case the judge described the local authorities’ “blinding incompetence” – because while the police, social services, local churches and schools had all independently noted the abuse, there was no communication between them to build a bigger picture.

I know of a recent case where a child was listed as “at risk” because his mother’s criminally violent boyfriend had put her in hospital on more than one occasion. The child disappeared from school for over a month. During that time his teachers contacted social workers in an attempt to track the child. It transpired that the family had moved cities, and the social worker arranged for the child’s case to be transferred to the appropriate county.

But in the month it took for the files to be moved the child and his mother had disappeared again. In all probability neither he nor his younger sister, who is under school age, are being monitored. It is just this such case that ContactPoint was designed to combat. Clearly it wasn’t working.

The government says it is “exploring the practicality of a national signposting approach, which would focus on helping a strictly limited group of practitioners to find out whether a colleague elsewhere is working, or has previously worked, with the same vulnerable child. We are working closely with our partners to assess the feasibility and affordability of such an approach.”

Nobody knows how many vulnerable children will be abused or killed while such discussions take place. The failure of ContactPoint is not a good enough reason to scrap it entirely and within too short a period to put anything else in place. With some adjustment, consideration and better implementation, and -as the new government knows- serious investment, Labour’s initiative might actually work to provide the bridge between vital but bureaucratic and locally run services.

The new government has clearly chosen to tap in on the (admittedly justified) zeitgeist concerns about data protection at the expense of child protection.

(Image credit: Victoria Climbie, PA)

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