According to Anne Rossiter writing in Talk is Cheap* Comment is Free, the government’s obsessive control freakery is nothing more than an attempt to get to know us better. As opposed, that is, to bureaucratic obsession with data mining. Oh, no Ann denies that it is any such thing:
Whatever New Labour is doing it is not, as AC Grayling wrongly suggested here, leading us towards some “bureaucratic despotism”, warned of by Weber. Look at current reforms – as many have been about limiting bureaucracy, through choice and market instruments, as have been about targets or management power. The best of New Labour’s reforms have been about empowering people, moving influence away from the monolith towards the individual.
Riiiight…. Anyone who deals with the machinery of state (and I keep mine to the absolute minimum) will realise that no amount of data sharing will solve the core problem; incompetence. Also, what Rossiter forgets (or chooses to ignore) is that the data is our data and it should be entirely up to us to decide who has access to what; not the state deciding for its own convenience. I would be interested to know which reforms have reduced what bureaucracy, exactly… I don’t recall being empowered by New Labour, merely an increased awareness of the state attempting to manage me for my own good, of course. I don’t need managing. I am an adult. I can manage myself perfectly well, thankyou very much.
Successful data sharing will do the same. It will make information reflect citizens’ priorities not bureaucratic priorities.
As David Moss points out when commenting on this story (and providing a wonderfully sarcastic deconstruction) over at the NO2ID newsblog, the Child support agency had access to data but its incompetence made life a misery for anyone unfortunate enough to interact with it. So, once more, we come back to incompetence… Then there’s the tax credits cock-up and the Criminal Records Bureau – which, I might point out is to expand its area of operations this year to cover other fields of enterprise.
Government that works properly has more power over people’s lives than government that works badly. People have different opinions about how desirable this is.
Well, she’s right about that… I certainly have an opinion. I want the government to have minimal power over my life. The government is there to serve me as a member of the electorate, not to exercise power over me. I do not belong to the state, it has no rights over me and I will not interact with it any more than is absolutely necessary to get along. I will, therefore, resist every attempt possible to give it information about me, my life, my circumstances and my family. Ideally, I want government to have negligible power over my life.
Government departments have evolved over time, reflecting many changing priorities. They are not particularly well designed to deliver the services we demand today. For public servants to have the right information to do their jobs different agencies and departments must share data. This happens already, but it happens haphazardly and sometimes not at all. Consequences vary from the ridiculous – 44 requests for the same information by the same department – to the tragic – inaction by social services dealing with Victoria Climbie.
This prize piece of gobbledygook is straight out of the Blair book of “modernism”. I.e. if it’s old, then it should be ditched and a “modern” solution sought. For “modern”, read obsessive control freakery and data sharing. Having indulged in anecdote and scaremongering, Ms Rossiter then goes on to tell an outright lie:
Reports about “super-databases” turned out to be false.
Er, NHS Database? The proposed all super duper child database? And, what about the National Identity Register? That it hasn’t happened yet isn’t through lack of desire on the part of government, it is simply that they bit off more than they could chew. It is certainly still in the legislation.
Data sharing can improve how government works for people, it can respect people’s different valuations of privacy, and it should be pursued together with increased citizen oversight of government.
No. Data sharing is the antithesis of privacy. Privacy will only be ensured by keeping government out of our personal business, by ensuring that the strict protocols currently preventing civil servants from passing information from one department to another remain in place. Not only is Rossiter wrong, she is dangerously wrong. I note from the comments, that others share my opinion.
This, for instance, caught my eye:
I expect governments to lie to me, and I expect governments to misuse data for their own narrow benefit. I expect politicians to lie, and I expect politicians to misuse data for their own narrow benefit. I am rarely disappointed.
Indeed.
*hat tip, notsaussure.
“Wonderfully”, thank you.
“Sarcastic”, I hope not.
Whenever the pro-information-sharers try to justify the IS Index, they trot out Victoria Climbie’s name as a reprehensible variant of ‘Mornington Crescent’. This repeated, glib waving of the poor child’s shroud verges on the indecent – have they even read the Laming Report? Laming actually attributed Victoria’s death to “widespread organisational malaise” and lack of accountability. As Eileen Munro said in evidence to the Education & Skills Committee, the problem “wasn’t shortage of information, but there was a shortage of wisdom of how to understand that information. Giving those workers even more information would make them less competent than they were.”
One of the greatest objections to the children’s Information Sharing Index from frontline social workers is that, despite the fact it is advertised as having some connection with child protection, in reality it’s likely to cause a great deal of harm to child protection by shifting the emphasis to more general provision of services (which, in any case, often aren’t available because of budget cuts) and relegating child protection to a sub-set of vaguer concerns about all children’s development. Hence the Information Commissioner’s oft-quoted observation that you don’t find a needle in a haystack by creating a bigger haystack.
I thought the use of the examiner’s report rather effective – and distinctly sarcastic. Irony, perhaps?
Terri, I, too, am weary of seeing poor little Victoria Climbie trotted out as an excuse for draconian legislation when it was incompetence that was responsible for people missing vital clues and failing to act upon them, rather than a lack of information.