The Children's Index

Be afraid, be very afraid if you have worries about increasingly eroded civil liberties or the amount of information that is held on computer about your children.

In 1996 the Conservative Government launched a project that will, next year, become the Children's Index under the current Labour administration. The original purpose of the index was to record how children were doing at school so that their progress or lack of it could be monitored by any education authority in the country.

The index has subsequently been updated, tweaked over the last ten years until it has reached the point where from 2007 the information contained about your children will begin with a forty question report compiled from schoolteachers, childminders, nursery school workers, youth leaders etc.

The thinking behind the new Children's Index is commendable.

The death through violent neglect of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié in 2000 revealed that, while police, health professionals and social workers were all aware to varying degrees that she was being abused, there was no inter-agency discussion of her case and so the full, horrific nature of her plight went undetected.

By recording health and other developmental information about the country's 12 million children, it is hoped that an early warning can be sounded over such cases. The new index will carry details of everything from vaccination records to whether a child is eating enough fruit and vegetables, or is struggling in the classroom. The Government also want to introduce compulsory fingerprinting for every child that has his or her own passport.

The intentions may be honourable, but the solution is both sinister and flawed. The compulsory collation of such a plethora of information is unnecessarily intrusive and makes the introduction of identity cards look positively benign in comparison. There are already worries that the index could fall foul of data protection legislation, while a challenge under human rights laws looks inevitable.

But it gets worse. Ministers claim this gigantic database will be completely confidential — though how that claim can be made with any confidence when 400,000 civil and public servants will have access to the information escapes us. Then in the next breath they say there will have to be a special category of children — those with "celebrity status" — whose details need not be given in case they get into the "wrong hands". Either the database is secure or it is not. If there are any doubts about that, then no one's child should be on it.

The children of you and me my fellow bloggers will be indexed, but the children of those in the public eye will not. And it won't just be the children of Cheryl and Cashley. It will be the children of Tony and Cherie, too (they don't want a certain person's vaccination record leaking out, do they?).

So this is what we voted for in 1997 — the nanny state reaching a new level of intrusion, with special privileges for the political/media/showbiz/sporting Establishment. If those of us so far over to the left we are practically on the right of the political map can only shudder when thinking about the wider implications here.

Who is responsible for bringing up children? I've always believed that whilst parents are the people responsible for bringing up our children society as a whole must exercise its collective responsibility - if you see the local hooligans smashing up the bus stop either intervene or call 999 - don't ignore it - but this is one step beyond that level of nuturing.

How ironic is it that a Government that for years has preached and hectored about the importance of good parenting, that has actually introduced parenting classes, tax breaks for parents, an improved family tax credit system and encouraged mothers to return to work, should, with the press of the enter key, devalue the status of the mother and father in this way.

And anyone who thinks this new mechanism will prevent a repeat of dreadful cases such as Victoria Climbié's is, let's be honest, not intelligent enough to be in office. If social workers are not competent enough to complete routine paperwork then why should they spend time completing online forms - shouldn't they be protecting the children under their care? Shouldn't more money and resources be put into better training?

Have this Government learnt nothing from the mounmental cock-ups they have presided over in relation to IT implementation?Think Swanwick, think NHS, think Passport Agency, think DVLA - all good intentions but cocked-up in a way even the most technophobic would have nightmares about.

What is also a worry is that the Police can enter the name of your child if they are questionnned, not cautioned, about an incident that they consider anti-social. The information will also be used to profile potential criminals from an early age - there is already one case where a nine-month old baby has been identified as a potential criminal and its computer record states it as so.

Schools have a habit (as I know only too well) of recording the victims of school bullying as well as the perps - do we really want people to know that our children have already been victimised?

We've been down this road before with the CRIS system of recording crimes that is now used in this country, policemen generally spend more time filling in forms then they do trying to catch criminals. It's the same in the NHS, I have a client whose day job is a ward sister in our areas biggest hospital, all her staff are expected to do half an hours overtime each night (without pay) so that they can complete the paperwork that is now required as part of patient care.

This is the road that Mrs Thatcher took us down back in the early eighties when she realised that the NHS wasn't accountable enough but she's long gone and what she began is now turning into a monster of state controlled intrusion.

Once this computerised system gets into operation it will be a paedophiles wet dream fully realised. Every vulnerable child in the country will be out there at a price, the Civil Service has it's share of paedophiles as much as any organisation and information of this sort has a price. Isn't the possibility that every weirdo connected to a computer has the potential access to information about where your son or daughter lives, goes to school, spends their freetime worrying?