Tomorrow the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, will present his Emergency Budget to Parliament. Given the chastening experience of several countries on the European continent, and the size of Britain's national debt, it has been widely recognised across the political spectrum that cuts to public spending are needed.
Big Brother Watch believes that if cuts have to be made, they should fall on the relics of the previous Government that are not only expensive, but also invade our privacy and infringe our liberty. With that in mind, below we have reproduced an extract from How to Cut Public Spending: (and Still Win an Election) edited by Matthew Sinclair, which sets out three major projects that could be culled.
These are by no means the only large state databases and authoritarian organisations we would like to see the back of. But they are a start that would help tackle the deficit and free the British people from overbearing government.
Curbing over-extended government
When governments attempt to do too much, the cost of failure is rarely just financial. Lives have been ruined by ineffective and intrusive databases, political responsibilities deferred to faceless bureaucracies. Driven by the pursuit of ‘efficiency’, Government has brushed off the implications for data security and personal liberty, centralising information and power in systems that it does not understand and cannot work. Over-ambitious, unnecessary and unpopular projects should now be brought to an end. Nannying government publicity should be curtailed.
Abolish Contact Point, the children’s database
£44 million from 2010/11 onwards
Contact Point is a database meant to contain the personal details of every child in the UK up to the age of eighteen, and is designed to reduce administrative burdens for people working with children. It has, however, been plagued by controversy, with data safety experts drawing attention to serious security failings. Some 390,000 people will have access to the details of eleven million children, including those whose families have never been in need of social care services. With access extended to so many people, proper scrutiny over use and retention of the data concerned is effectively impossible.
The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has also found that Contact Point is almost certainly illegal under European human rights or data protection law, ‘because of the privacy concerns and legal issues with maintaining sensitive data with no effective opt-out', and because the security is inadequate (having been designed as an afterthought), and because it provides a mechanism for registering all children that complements the National Identity Register. Given the Government's appalling data security record, the children's database is an accident waiting to happen.
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