Select Committee on Home Affairs Written Evidence


Appendix A

  As the government moves steadily towards introducing data-matching—the exchange of our personal information between public bodies without our consent—it is worth considering the words of Sir Nicholas Browne-Wilkinson. As long ago as 1990, Sir Nicholas, then a senior high court judge, now a law lord, warned: "If the information obtained by the police, the Inland Revenue, the social security services, the health service and other agencies were to be gathered together in one file, the freedom of the individual would be gravely at risk. The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state."

  Eight years later, Elizabeth France, then data protection registrar now the information commissioner, echoed these fears: "Wholesale data-matching exercises are a major invasion of the private lives of people to whom no suspicion of any wrongdoing attaches."

  But as the report from the performance and innovation unit—one of Whitehall's most influential bodies—data-matching is very much back on the government agenda. The unit's lengthy report dwells on the potential advantages of easier, quicker, cheaper, more convenient, delivery of services ranging from benefits and tax returns to driving licences, and in tackling crime and fraud. It estimates that the cost of identity fraud to the economy amounts to £1.2 billion a year.

  The report also emphasises the need to protect privacy. But it also admits there has to be a "trade-off between individual privacy and the public good". It adds that "where data are used or shared without the consent of the individual" a balance must be struck between individual rights and the "wider public interest".

  The definition of the public interest is extremely broad. It includes national security—a term described in Whitehall as an "ambulatory concept"—public safety, statistical analysis, the protection of the economy, health, morals, and the "protection of the rights or freedoms of others".

  Ministers cling to the old argument that the innocent have nothing to fear. The information commissioner's annual report this year revealed it had received almost 10,000 complaints about the handling of personal data. In one case, a man received demands from the Child Support Agency about a child who was not his. The department of work and pensions had allocated his national insurance number to both him and the real father.

  Similarly, an audit of the Police National Computer found that 65% of its records contained errors. And in 1999, 214 cases involving abuse by staff of the benefits agency were investigated. The passport agency and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) want to combine their databases on the grounds that it will make it easier to order a new driving licence or passport. Yet the failings of computer databases in one of these agencies led to more than 500,000 people waiting for passports in early summer 1999, while the DVLA has admitted selling information about vehicle licence owners to private companies.

  As the civil rights group, Liberty, has pointed out, the scope for all those abuses and errors being compounded in a data-matching run are obvious.





 
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