Children Bill - March 2004

To contact your MP you can send an e-mail via the web site

The site will also tell you who your MP is.

EO would also like to encourage people to support the ARCH Children Bill campaign. For information, downloadable leaflets and a sample letter go to the ARCH website

If you would like some ideas about what to say here is another sample letter which you could alter or use as is:

Dear Sir

I am very concerned about some of the provisions in Part 2 of the Children Bill 2004, currently before Parliament.

The Children Bill proposes to give the Secretary of State the power to establish databases of children containing whatever information he deems appropriate in order to improve the well-being of children or to safeguard and promote their welfare.

The bill would give the Secretary of State the power to specify what went into the databases, who would have to provide information, and who would have access to information. Furthermore, he would be given powers to compel disclosure of information even where it contravened common law, thereby abolishing client and patient confidentiality. This information would be collected and retained for every child regardless of whether there was any concern about the child.

The databases could also contain information about parents and information would be collected and held without the knowledge or permission of either parents or children.

The bill seeks to lower the threshold for sharing information between professionals so that information on children and their parents could be shared when someone decided that there was a "cause for concern" rather than a "suspicion of significant harm" as at present. This might lead to a large number of alerts being generated
which could distract professionals from those children who were at serious risk.

The hope is that children at risk will be identified more easily by establishing such databases and allowing the sharing of information more freely between professionals. Because of the difficulties of maintaining large databases and the potential for swamping social services with alerts on children who are not at risk, however, it
seems to me that it represents a huge invasion of the privacy of families for questionable gain.

I am also very concerned about the security of these databases given the wide range of people who could be given access to them, about the quality of the information held in the databases, as parents will not be able to verify the information being held on themselves and their children, and about the cost of maintaining such databases.

I think the money that would be spent on these databases would be better spent directly on improving services and support for families. Therefore, I would urge you to oppose the information sharing provisions in Part 2 of the Children Bill.

all the best,

jill (for the EO DfES team)