by Mary Hardy, TCW
The Online Safety Act has already limited free speech; the Crime and Policing Bill awaiting its Second Reading in the Lords saw last-minute changes in the Commons to allow the retrieval of data via any seized device; ahead of it in the Upper House is the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which, unless amended, will enable the state to collect and connect data on every child.
IN 2023 Tony Blair and William Hague co-signed a report called A New National Purpose in which they reasoned: ‘With science and technology as our new national purpose, we can innovate rather than stagnate in the face of increasing technological change. This purpose must rise above political differences to achieve a new cross-party consensus that can survive any change of government.’
Now, just over a year into a Starmer-led administration, it is striking how many of Labour’s Bills are steroid-enhanced replicas of those proposed by previous Tory governments. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bridget Phillipson’s inappropriately named Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Alongside some measures similar to Boris Johnson’s 2022 Schools Bill, its pernicious Clause 4 enables much wider information-sharing through ‘consistent identifiers’ (CI) for every child. These will be assigned to children from birth, and the Department for Education (DfE) is presently trialling the use of their NHS number for this purpose.
Anyone who cares about children’s rights and the wise use and protection of personal data should be highly dubious of the kind of ‘wellbeing’ that this Bill looks set to advance.
The proposed consistent identifier will serve to drive a larger wedge of state oversight between parents and their children, promoting as it does not wellbeing, but surveillance. Be in no doubt, it will weaken children’s rights to privacy, family and home. It will facilitate the state’s underlying desire to oversee the whole of a child’s life.