Government announces "new approach" to public sector data sharing

The government is to amend data protection legislation to enable public sector bodies to share more data with each other, the private sector and the public, the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has announced.

Speaking at the Information Commissioner’s Conference this week, the minister said that the proposals – to be published in May - would “revisit” the recommendations made by the 2008 Walport-Thomas Review commissioned by the Ministry of Justice. This suggested a series of legal, regulatory and cultural changes necessary to facilitate more extensive data sharing. (The link to the official copy of the report on the MoJ website is presently broken, but a summary is available here: http://idealgovernment.com/2008/07/summary_recommendations_of_walport_thomas_data_sharing_review_for_moj/)

The minister said that the proposals would introduce a new approach to the sharing of public sector data.

He said: “A key priority moving forwards is that we overhaul, that we modernise the public sector’s traditional 20th Century approaches to sharing data. In the past the public sector has not been clever or effective at sharing key intelligence...we have been hampered by legal complexities and muddled myths about what, when and how data can be shared.”

“One of the most frequent complaints I hear from doctors and care workers and data professionals is just how difficult essential data sharing can be. This is because we make it difficult, even when data sharing is in the national or public interest.

“It’s clearly wrong to have social workers, doctors, dentists, Job Centres, the police all working in isolation on the same problems. Access to all of the relevant information would often enable much better decision making by frontline staff – not to mention cut down on the administration and bureaucracy.”

“And I want to encourage all of you to challenge the received wisdom, to challenge every assertion, every assumption about what can’t be done. And where there are real legal or cultural barriers – tell us what they are.”

Technology, he added, had moved on to the point where data could shared between agencies when the need arose without the need to create permanent centralised databases. “It’s about bringing together the data at a point in time - to provide the necessary confidence - and then disaggregating it again. At no point does information need be held on the same server to be correlated,” he said.

The minister also announced that the The National Fraud Authority and Cabinet Office will shortly publish details a new counter fraud checking service, which will utilise the more flexible data sharing regime being proposed .