Government to ditch child protection database

The government has elected to shut down the contraversial ContactPoint database, which holds records of all the children in England.  The database was established at great cost to enable different agencies (the NHS, social services, police, etc) to share information in the wake of the Victoria Climbié murder.

As a parent I'm wary of my children's details being stored on large databases, especially given the UK's record of poor public sector information governance.  (Actually, to be precise, most of the breaches have actually been the fault of private sector contractors working for the public sector; the public sector itself is actually very good at looking after peoples' information).  But equally I'm very aware that ContactPoint was set up for a very good reason.

Scrapping ContactPoint now is like a football club sacking its manager without having a clue who to replace him with.  Usually in that situation, the team's performance suffers, sometimes with disasterous consequences. ContactPoint was by no means the ideal solution and the government are correct to look for an alternative, but they should make sure that alternative is set up and ready to replace ContactPoint before removing the existing solution. As things stand they're reverting back to a dangerous vacuum of information.

Bovine bother in food chain

There have been a couple of news stories this week about milk and beef
derived from cloned cattle entering the human food chain. The media
seem to be focusing on two particular viewpoints related to this:
those that are outraged about the very idea of cloning and those who
say the products are safe so there's nothing to worry about.

Both of those perspectives are missing the bigger picture. The issue
here is not about the morality or ethics of cloning, and neither is it
about whether or not these particular products are safe. The issue for
me is that something that was expressly prohibited from entering the
food chain was allowed to do so. We may have got off lightly in this
case as yes, perhaps those products are safe - but if the controls
that were supposed to keep these goods out of our food failed then
they will also fail for much more dangerous prohibited goods and
practices. Instead of focusing on the issue of whether or not
products from cloned cattle are safe, the media should be asking
questions about how something that's meant to be forbidden from
entering our food managed to find its way onto the shop floor.

It's particularly interesting that the news has come from the Foods
Standard Agency. If the FSA is aware of these problems now, in
retrospect, why were they not aware at the time? To use a well worn
cliche, they're being reactive not proactive, and clearly that needs
to change.