By Julian Goldsmith, 17 July 2007 13:00
NEWS
Capgemini UK has been awarded a six-year, £40m contract to build and host an online directory intended to make it easier for public services employees working with children to co-ordinate services. The project is being funded by the newly created Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).
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Called ContactPoint, the network will hold records of all children in England from birth until they reach 18. Initially data will come from the DCSF, the NHS Connecting for Health, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Office for National Statistics. Other data sources will be added over time, according to Capgemini.
The DCSF and Capgemini are keen to stress that the system will be audited by independent security experts during its build. The system is expected to go live from early 2008 and Capgemini will host it until 2014.
The resource is part of the government's Every Child Matters: Change for Children initiative, which seeks to co-ordinate social care for the young across England.
In a policy statement published in May 2007 the DCSF said: "ContactPoint will enable practitioners across education, health, social care, youth justice and the voluntary sector to find out who else is working with a child or young person so that they can, where appropriate, work together to deliver better coordinated support, and improve the outcomes and the experience of public services for all children, young people and families."
The data repository will be partitioned into 150 parts, relating to each local authority in England. Any partition can be accessed by any authorised user and data is structured so that children who move between authorities will not fall out of the sytem.
It is expected that the total cost of implementing the system throughout all of the local authorities will cost the government £224m over three years and will involve each of them setting up teams to support data migration, matching and cleansing during roll-out and to promote the resource to its employees.
Comments
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1. anonymous
"Any partition can be accessed by any authorised user".
You what?
So ANY authorised user in ANY local authority has free rein to browse the ENTIRE database, containing not just details of the children, but their parents, teachers, doctors, social workers, carers, etc., without any need to show a justified purpose in so doing?
Whatever happened to the Data Protection principles?
No-one would dispuute the slogan "Every Child Matters". But we should be deeply concerned about its use as a justification for allowing swathes of "authorised users" to browse the personal details of families across the country.
Why all the fuss about the National Identity Register, which would hold far less information, when this database is being slipped in under the smokescreen of an emotive slogan?
2. dennis armstrong
Why is the government willing to put every child in the UK at risk by making details available on-line to anyone that can hack into a system and extract information and use that information to target vulnerable families
3. Richard
What a contrast; what a waste:
Libya's leader was mocked for "wasting" $250M buying the One Laptop Per Child system, hoping to improve Libyan children's education;
UK's Blair and Brown are wasting 225M Pounds on this database system for snooping on UK children;
But strangely, not on their own children or those of their buddies;
Apparently, children of politicians and celebs will be excluded - for security reasons!
So, apparently it's all right for the PM's son to be found drunk & unconscious in a London gutter: No ASBO or "parenting class" needed!
4. anonymous
Oh come now people. Why is it that any time a government agency attempts to become more efficient at fulfulling a need the "exposurephobics" start whining? I can only speak to the North American experience (little disclaimer there) but I can probably pull up a HUGE number of cases where we had children up and down the scale of sadly neglected through dead-dead-dead because nobody could find out "who was doing what ... and with which ... and to whom". The only problem I have with this is that it would appear to be politicians making the major decisions ... and we ALL know what that means