M
Member
Speaking in the House of Lords on 22 May 2025
Debate
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools BillContribution
Police were also intended to use the database to find out whether a child has had contact with a youth offending team or services such as drug rehabilitation. The Joseph Rowntree Trust report found that this was deterring teenagers from accessing health advice. One of its case studies was of a single mum who was terrified that social services would take her child away if she talked to her GP about postnatal depression. It called for 11 of the 46 systems assessed, including ContactPoint, to be scrapped or redesigned immediately, and for the right for citizens to access most public services anonymously. More broadly, and beyond this report, the civil liberties element was a key factor in ContactPoint’s demise. The then Government never satisfied critics that the security arrangements were enough to assuage concerns about the access of an estimated 400,000 people to children’s names, ages, addresses, et cetera. It was not only that this information might be misused; there was much discomfort with the basic intrusiveness of the whole approach.
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