Nanny Knows Best … Who To Give Your Private Details To

Surely I’m not the only one who finds this somewhat sinister?

Data on people with low incomes could be shared with energy companies to help people pay their fuel bills.

The government wants to share details so extra cash from suppliers, as well as existing grants, can be better targeted at the elderly and vulnerable.

…

This could see information about who is on certain benefits shared with the suppliers, although new legislation would be needed to do this.

Age Concern director general Gordon Lishman said that the sharing of data was “controversial, but justified”.

Nanny not only knows best, but knows to pass your confidential financial details onto a third party who has no business knowing what your income level is without your permission.

This is the government that wants us to believe that not only are our details in safe hands in the form of HMRC, but that all the eggs that will be held in the basket of the National Identity Database will be equally immune from danger. Yet, with the irrepressible and naïve belief in the benign benevolence of the state that only socialists can muster, they then propose handing over thousands of people’s highly personal financial details to the energy companies.

“Oh, but they can opt out” comes the usual refrain … yes, but presuming that this scheme seems to be aimed at those who cannot use a price comparison website (though see below), then what value is an opt-out provision?

In any case, two other points come out of this:

1) If the increase in “fuel poverty” is being fuelled (sorry) by the rise in energy prices, and the government is making significantly more from fuel taxes as a result, then surely the good socialist wealth-redistributing way of doing things would be to increase the winter fuel allowance?

2) In the case of some of the older generation, they don’t like to claim special circumstances or “plead poverty” - they are too proud … or simply unaware. That being the case, will they be at all impressed that their personal financial circumstances are being officially leaked to the “gas board”? And isn’t there an underlying and insulting assumption at play here that the elderly are too thick to work it out for themselves if you just pointed them in the right direction?

Paranoid?

Am I the only one who finds this sinister? It was a link I followed from an email I received as a “stakeholder” from the Home Office (a hangover from when I held a Community Safety-related portfolio):

Public-Private Forum on Identity Management

The Public-Private Forum on Identity Management is chaired by Sir James Crosby and has now met five times. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has asked the Forum to produce a full report which will be delivered in late summer.

The Forum has representation from twelve organisations, drawn equally from the public and private sectors. The public sector is represented by (in alphabetical order) the City of London Police; the Department for Work and Pensions; the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; HM Revenue and Customs; the Identity and Passport Service of the Home Office (IPS); and the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

The private sector is represented on the Forum by (in alphabetical order) Barclays Bank; Boots the Chemists; British Airways; Compass Group plc; Linklaters; and O2.

The Forum’s terms of reference are to:

• Review the current and emerging use of identity management in the private and public sectors and identify best practice.
• Consider how public and private sectors can work together, harnessing the best identity technology to maximise efficiency and effectiveness.
• Produce a preliminary report for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Ministerial Committee on identity management by Easter 2007.

The Forum will make proposals to the Chancellor and the Ministerial Committee on identity management early next year.

Sir James Crosby has said “Our recommendations should focus on consumer benefits which can be achieved by partnership between the public and private sectors in implementing better and possibly complementary processes for identity management”.

Ah, there it is … “consumer benefits”.

Two of the themes this forum are looking at include “convergence” and “consumer protection”.

Convergence

Identifying the key steps in any programme of convergence of identity management between the public and private sectors. This includes consideration of common standards for identity management particularly for the purposes of banking, employment and travel.

Now I can accept that a shop might want to know my personal details if I want to use my credit card with them, or open some sort of account, but I would have a choice disclosing that information (because I could just use cash or go somewhere else).

I accept that my bank needs to know my personal details so that some scrote doesn’t come along and clear out my account for me.

Yet isn’t my protection as a consumer better served by a principle of each organisation having their own set of relevant data, rather than putting all my identity and data protection “eggs” in one basket covering both private and public sector bodies? More to the point, a standard that, for all the language of “partnership” and “working together”, will inevitably end up statutory and enforceable?

Why does the government as a whole need to know these details – or to be more precise, why does it need these details to be held according to an agreed universal standard? Why does my driving licence information at the DVLA have to have anything in common with the data on how many minutes I ran up on my mobile phone bill?

I suspect there is only one real reason for the state to want to have “convergence” - everyone, private and public, working to one standard - and it’s little to do with consumer protection. It might, on the other hand, possibly have something to do with the ID cards debate.

While many are being easily distracted by the subject of ID cards themselves, and the cost of the project (though these are valid points of argument), the real issue is surely the centralised database that the government wants to put in place. We have already heard about the moves to centralise state-held information – though I still haven’t heard why the DVLA needs to know how much tax* I paid last year - now we see the tractor-beam extending its power to the private sector – where we do still have some choice about whether to give up our details and to whom.

This will all be, of course, to make our lives easier and for our own protection.

Liberty is rarely bludgeoned to death, rather it is slowly smothered.

 

* The answer to “how much tax I paid” is an easy one: “too much”.