The government – possibly the MoJ maintains the Register of Births, Marriages & Deaths; Its expensive new agency registers the new expensive form of Power of Attorney.

Rather than complex “data sharing” or the obsolete process of obtaining & posting certified copies of register entries to numerous bossy organisations:

Would it not be more sensible if we could simply refer these bossy organisations to the particular entry on a secure online version of the registers?

This seems so simple and obvious, that I am (not!) surprised that it hasn’t already been implemented.

So, in the event of someone’s death, the relative or trustee or solicitor would simply supply the relevant “link” and login details of the entry on the secure register to the numerous public and private organisations that seem to need to know.

So, rather than being controlled from “the centre,” this whole process would remain under the control of the relative / trustee / solicitor.

Finally, and as others have stated, all those new “registers” which purport to check applicants for sensitive posts “so as to protect the public” have at least three glaring flaws:

1. Someone’s past behaviour is not an infallible guide to their future behaviour: Perhaps they’ve never been tempted, or caught… yet? Alternatively, perhaps the punishment really worked and they’re now reformed?

2. The application process for “clearance” from these registers deters many honourable people who could make a great contribution to society:

For example, there’s a danger that the lack of people to lead activities for young people actually results in more young people being harmed by boredom & neglect than would have been harmed by the isolated but ghastly events so beloved by the media.

3. Increasing numbers of people are now effectively excluded from society and unemployable: In the past, most previous criminal convictions were eventually considered “spent.” But in our present “enlightened” era, thanks to these new “registers,” even the lowest level of “anti-social” behaviour seems to blight someone’s life – permanently – even if the matter was never actually proved in court.

But if I’m a fraudster, I’ll just tell DVLA that I don’t have a passport, won’t I? Anyway, why don’t they just look at driving licence photo THEY ALREADY HAVE form the licence I’m replacing?

The former is some sort of hoped-for Holy Grail that will magically solve numerous problems while the latter is in such widespread and commonplace use, that it is barely considered to be data sharing. (An obvious example is the use of the Post Office Address File, or PAF, to validate address information as it is entered.)

I think ‘data sharing’ is a case of forgetting just how far we have come – 80% of the benefits have been achieved for 20% of the cost and the conference you attended is focussed on extracting the remaining 20% of benefit but baulking at the inevitable 80% cost.
True enough and that, I think, neatly encapsulates the problems we see with ‘data sharing’ as wished-for by the the government and others. Unless there is an explicit purpose in the sharing then the benefits will always

And the Scottish ECS was not only less ambitious, it was founded in the fundamentally different premise that the explicit consent of the patient was sought before adding their details to the system. The system is still flawed (why should Scottish Sir Humphrey get to see the data as well – he’s got nothing to do with clinical or emergency care) but not so blatantly a grab for people’s complete medical records as NHS CRS/SUS.

And it is also an example where ‘enhanced’ data sharing is underway and has produced a litany of mis-identifications and false positives that have ruined the lives of numerous innocent people.

Add to that the proposal contained in the Vetting and Barring Scheme to have publicly available the personal details of 11 million volunteers and employees in sensitive posts, and I believe we are just building a recipe for disaster. It will come in the form of either the massive loss of personal data, the (ab)use of such data for the purpose of child abuse, or else as CRB-assisted abuse, where an abuser, unknown to the authorities as an abuser, ‘passes’ a CRB and is given access to abuse the vulnerable.

CRBs are not a good example

That is a help and an improvement, I can see. But it falls within the hypothesis that the likeliest purpose of administrative data sharing is to take some of the clunkiness out of clunky admin.

Has anyone else used this?

This may be too late (just picked it up), but I am a strong advocate of data sharing so would oppose any attempt to claim the premise is flawed.

FWIW, here are some views….

1) why should I have to provide the same information multiple times to different government bodies
2) Even more so, why should somebody with a turbulent life have to keep updating their circumstances with lots of different bodies, and risk losing benefits if something falls through the cracks(I think DWP and local government have achieved significant improvements in benefit processing efficiency and service levels by sharing info)
3) Why should fraudsters be free to claim the same benefits or tax concessions in different local authorities or different contexts? (I think various fraud initiatives can claim significant recoveries as a result of data sharing)
4) Why should policy makers and managers not be able to base their decisions on the best information available (I think UK health can probably claim one of the world’s best information bases on clinical outcomes)
5) Why should my mother not be free to chose between receiving hospital treatment in her home area, or near one of her children, with all her records available to all involved? (long live NPFIT)
6) Why should we impose unnecessary costs on the police by not tracking offenders through the system

Etc etc.

Fair points all!

Answer off the top of my head.

1. Data Protection applies to name-linked data. FOI and PSI apply to all data. Copyright can affect access and sharing of PSI.

2. Data sharing of name-linked data has to reflect the terms on which it was collected. However, such data can be retained after the legal status of the data keeper has changed: departments merge; Parliament changes the law;
international agreements are made; privatisation occurs. Reports like “The Power of Information” influence policy. Technology changes.

3. Data sharing of all data within central government and the wider public sector is often worthwhile. Re-use of the EU MS’s PSI by the private sector could be worth tens of billions of Euros. So ‘information as a service’ provided by approved private sector companies in a competitive market to all who need it will often be better than public bodies collecting and storing the data they use.