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.
