Dave Hill's Big Britain

E-Waste

ARCH on "Transformational Government":

"Some beer-mat calculations of our own reveal that the £7bn apparently required to staff Transformational Government could usefully plug the shortage of 2,000 social workers, 5,000 midwives and 5,000 health visitors. It could also supply computer equipment to every child in England - and still leave £4bn in loose change."

More here.

ContactPoint: To Be Continued

My pre-Christmas update on this at this.

School Insecurity

Terri at ARCH is right. This is pretty worrying:

"Personal details of two million primary schoolchildren in England are being put at risk by staff taking home unprotected data, it was claimed yesterday. A survey of almost 1,000 primary schools found that 49% were backing up pupil data on to discs, memory sticks or tapes which were taken off the school premises, exposing the material to loss or theft. IT experts RM School Management Solutions, which carried out the survey, said that only 1% of respondents encrypted the data. A further 4% of schools were leaving sensitive and unprotected data at unsecured locations on the school premises."

That's how the Guardian reported it: in brief. No other paper reported it at all.

Against ContactPoint: Latest News

The 10 Downing Street petition now has over 1,000 names. It's open until 20th December. Sign now and while you're in fighting mood urge your MP to sign the Early Day Motion of Annette Brooke MP, Lib Dem spokesperson on children, asking the government to "reconsider its decision to proceed" with the scheme. You could raise the matter with your local schoolteachers too.

I've had an indication that the government may be adjusting its defence of ContactPoint. A correspondent tells me of a colleague who wrote to Ed Balls mentioning the invoking by ministers of the Victoria Climbie case as the primary reason for the database being set up. Beverley Hughes has been especially quick to do this as a way of countering critics. I'm told Balls's reply included the following;

"In your letter, you assert the Government is introducing ContactPoint chiefly to prevent another terrible case like that of Victoria Climbie. This is not the case. The chief purpose of ContactPoint is to improve the efficiency of children's services by freeing up practitioner time."

My correspondent remarks that offering bureaucratic convenience as justification for reducing family privacy is unacceptable. Agreed. The same source also remarks:

"The government comments fail to mention that if you want to know a child's GP school, etc YOU CAN ASK THE CHILD OR PARENT. They keep talking as if there were no other route than IT. It's worth reminding people that the old fashioned low-tech solution of being polite and asking is still a viable option. Some LAs [local authorities] report [during pilot schemes] that users don't know who they are in contact with. We should not ask families to give up privacy to compensate for incompetent professional practice."

Agreed again. ContactPoint is a dud. And I haven't even mentioned E-Caf yet.

Talking About Freedom

Here's something I posted at Liberal Conspiracy yesterday. It argues that campaigns defending civil liberties will be more effective if they connect the principle with "common good" issues people can relate to in their everyday lives.

I’ve long had certain misgivings about boarding the civil liberties freedom train. It’s not that I object to its destination, more that the tone and emphasis of many of the arguments made for opposing the great gamut of dubious developments under Labour, from Asbos to ID cards to the proposed (or not) extension of pre-charge detention beyond 28 days, seem to be missing something.

Henry Porter’s campaigning pieces in The Observer have been a good example. The extended thread applause they unfailingly receive seems to me to be won too easily. Henry’s doggedness is admirable but his unfortunate joining in with the government’s crass campaign of last year to tick off veiled women for not being British properly exemplified how he sometimes comes at his subject in the manner of an affronted Tory, in this case seemingly unimpressed by the inconvenient assertion by some Muslim women at the time that to be veiled is be liberated rather than downtrodden. Similarly, it’s one thing to be appalled that Big Brother is everywhere but it will take more than quoting Voltaire to persuade a lot of people living on crime-riddled council estates that they’d be freer without CCTV than they, rightly or wrongly, feel with it.