The Guardian reports that the cabinet has secretly given the go-ahead to the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to set up Britain’s first national population computer database that is the foundation stone for a compulsory identity card scheme.
The “citizen information register” is to bring together all the existing information held by the government on the 58 million people resident in Britain.
It will include their name, address, date of birth, sex, and a unique personal number to form a “more accurate and transparent” database than existing national insurance, tax, medical, passport, voter and driving licence records.
The plans for a citizen information register have not been announced and the only official reference was a brief mention to a feasibility study in the government’s consultation paper on identity cards published last July. The scheme is a joint project between the Office of National Statistics and the Treasury and is designed to ensure that “public sector organisations have the right records about the right people at the right time.”
I am not sure that the Guardian article is entirely correct:
The plans for a citizen information register have not been announced and the only official reference was a brief mention to a feasibility study in the government’s consultation paper on identity cards published last July. The scheme is a joint project between the Office of National Statistics and the Treasury and is designed to ensure that “public sector organisations have the right records about the right people at the right time.”
The Office of National Statistics has published a consultation whitepaper back in July (submit your views by October 24th) called:
Civil Registration: Delivering Vital Change
I am slightly happier if the ONS were to be in charge of such a project rather than the Home Office or the Treasury. The ONS has more of a culture of anonymising individual Census respondents data, and of not revealing this to even the Police, under penalty of 2 years in jail under the Census Act.
Their proposals do seem to recognise that the whole system will come tumbling down if people do not trust the system and have not given their explicit permission for data sharing etc, so, unklike the Home Office ID Card plans, there is actually
“It would become an offence to access a record where permission has been withdrawn or not provided by the individual, their family or representative. A system for monitoring compliance would be developed. These offences are necessary to maintain the security and integrity of registration records and the information they contain.”
Why do these supposedly secret Cabinet decisions get leaked to the press ? If the Government cannot keep Cabinet discussions secret, why should we trust them with our sensitive personal data ?
If the Guardian article is true, then it looks as if the Government has pre-judged the Office of National Statistics consultation process.
I do not believe that this will ever happen. If they launch a feasibility study it won’t start. If it starts it’ll have to be abandonded half-way. If it gets further than half-way it’ll have to be radically de-scoped and if it ever goes live it won’t work.