Regular readers will (should?) have noticed that one of LC’s contributors, Dave Hill, has written several times on the subject of the government’s growing predilection for recording just about anything it can find out about children in some sort of national database – the most recently announced monstrosity being a national ‘school children’s’ database which promises to:

…enable students to build a lifelong record of their educational participation and achievements that can be accessed through the internet. The system would be password protected and would have two points of entry. Students could look up their full records and personal details by using one password. They could then give another password to employers to give them access to a restricted view of the information online.

All with yet another unique identifier (called the ‘unique learning number’) that ripe for inclusion on the National Identity Register when the government eventually decides that things have cooled off enough for them to get away with it.

In one of Dave’s previous articles on the subject he picked up on the following comment made by a government minister is reply to a query about the ContactPoint database, a comment that he understood at the time to have come from Ed Balls:

“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.”

The comment, itself is correctly rendered but the author of it was misidentified – it’s not Ed Balls who came up with this gem but the altogether more junior MP for Cardiff West and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the same department, Kevin Brennan, and Dave’s correspondent makes, in addition, something of an understatement in noting that ‘offering bureaucratic convenience as justification for reducing family privacy is unacceptable’. It’s a little more than that, in fact as I’ve hopefully demonstrated here, Brennan’s comment completely undermines the government’s legal justification for the ContactPoint and, in turn, so I have on good (legal) authority, goes some considerable way towards providing solid grounds for a judicial review of the legality of the entire system vis-a-vis the provisions of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

I’ll not trouble readers here with a repost of the full analysis of the potential legal ramifications of Brennan’s rather indiscreet comments and how this, in turn, relates to the current challenge to legality of a sizeable chunk of the current DNA database – it’s all laid over the Ministry, just follow the link in the last paragraph – suffice to say that I have been advised that, with the right plaintiff, a judicial review is not only possible but would stand a good chance of knocking a pretty big legal hole in the whole project.

Without labouring the point, Article 8 of ECHR provides a qualified right to privacy and respect for family life, one that specifies a limited set of purposes which might justify a government legitimately interfering with or restricting its citizen’s rights – and administrative convenience and efficiency isn’t one of them.

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