- Kable, Friday 17 July 2009 16.16 BST
The party leadership has kicked the issue onto the political playing field over the past year, with attacks on the NHS National Programme for IT, the ContactPoint children's directory, the National Identity Scheme, and government procurement strategies. In some cases it has made accusations of mismanagement and wasting public money, but it has also picked up the protests of the privacy lobby with claims that the government has an excessive appetite for large databases and is collecting too much information on individuals.
It has raised some valid concerns. There is a credible case in attacking the government's retention of innocent people's details on the National DNA Database, for questioning the purpose of the National Identity Register, and for asking whether it is necessary to use ContactPoint for every child in the country.
But it has also distorted facts and made some wild assertions. David Cameron has repeatedly referred to a non-existent "NHS supercomputer" when talking about the National Programme for IT. His opposition to ContactPoint has never made reference to the fact that it was developed in response to the findings of the Bichard Enquiry on child protection.
Now shadow immigration minister Damian Green has taken the trend to new extremes. His speech to the Centre for Policy Studies included some sound points about the dangers of building systems to suit public servants while ignoring the rights of individuals; but in an effort to amplify the threat claimed that virtually every aspect of government IT threatens civil liberties. The height of this was a claim that the shared services agenda, which has largely taken the form of organisations sharing systems for functions such as finance, HR and e-procurement, is "highly sinister". This is scaremongering that does not deserve to be taken seriously.
Of course, it's all part of the political game. As often happens with opposition parties, the information is gathered as ammunition against the government rather than to develop a proper understanding of the issues. In this context, they are more likely to turn to campaigners with axes to grind, and adopt the more indignant perspectives, than talk to those who are looking at both sides of an issue.
Hopefully this will account for little if, as most people expect, the Conservatives win the next election. Once in power their ministers will begin talking to civil servants and obtain a sudden appreciation of factors they ignored when in opposition. In most cases they will suddenly find reasons to maintain systems they previously attacked.
But there is always the danger of cases in which they have gone too far to think again. Constant criticisms can turn into policy commitments which cannot be dropped without embarrassment. We can see this in the pledge to abolish ContactPoint, without any reference to whether the party accepts or rejects the Bichard recommendations. (In this case it would be valid to keep the system but restrict its use to children identified as vulnerable, but that is less likely now that Cameron has made it a target).
Information management is one of the crucial issues in our society, and it is right that politicians are ready to argue over the government's use of IT. It is also right to challenge the government on the limits of the information it collects on people and how widely it is shared. But we could do with less of this cultivated indignation and more reasoned debate.
Mark Say
Senior Editor, Kable
