Over a number of years ministers have failed to persuade people that it would be a good idea to make it easier to share peoples’ sensitive data and permit the sharing of information that was collected for one purpose to be used for another. Ministers, realising that they cannot resort to the power of words, have opted instead for words of power. The result has been the digital economy bill, created by David Cameron and being rammed through parliament by his successor, Theresa May. Mrs May at the Home Office, according to reports, had little time for those who raised doubts over whether she had the legal authority to access confidential NHS data to trace immigrants. The ideological thrust is that it would be a good thing to unfetter the state, allowing it to integrate its many databases – irrespective of the quality of the information gathered – and deal with the downsides later.
These are worrying ideas. Peers on the committee in the upper house that scrutinises parliamentary bills have been astonished at the broad powers ministers are arrogating in the name of better governance. The “delegated powers” committee of the upper house describe as it as “inappropriate” for ministers to have “almost untrammelled powers” in sharing individuals’ data collected by one department to be used by another. The bill, the committee notes, allows civil servants not to respect the promises made to get the information or pledges about how it will be used and stored.
The information at stake is not trivial. It includes sensitive personal details on individuals’ “physical, mental health, emotional, social and economic” wellbeing. There’s also a provision to pass around data relating to a person’s “contribution made to society”. Ominously, vast quantities of personal information will be allowed to flow freely around government departments, councils, schools and police forces. This is not so much data sharing as data copying.
The implications for the ability to track citizens over their lifetime are mind-boggling. Even more remarkable is that the bill allows for information collected by private firms providing public services to be shared with government bodies. The committee rightly calls for this privatisation of public data to be removed. This week the House of Lords will debate the proposals, offering peers probably the last chance to create a better balance between the needs of government and the privacy of citizens than that provided in the bill. They should take it.