I think the Supreme Court has got it right by
saying that parts of the Scottish ‘named person’ scheme are contrary to the
right to privacy and family life.
The named person scheme looks far too much
like that other information sharing initiative, ContactPoint, for my liking.
The fundamental flaw in such schemes is
that they assume that just because information was not shared in a particular
tragic case, ensuring that similar information is available to a wide range of
professionals and officials routinely will avoid a similar tragedy in the
future. That is just ‘hindsight bias’ – seeing a past event as having been
predictable, despite there being little or no objective basis for predicting
it.
And there is absolutely no evidence to
suggest that information sharing (particularly on an industrial scale) in
itself protects children. Just because a ‘fact’ is written down in a file or a
database field, doesn’t mean that it is appreciated, understood and acted upon.
Indeed, not being able to see the wood for the trees is a major problem when
everybody is told everything.
Far better, in my view, to look at problems
of communication in child protection. Why is it that some important messages
are not sent or not received or not understood? We don’t need national policies
to start tackling those issues and the impact on making children safer would be
much greater than having a free for all with sharing sensitive information.
