Went to hear Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, speak at Northumbria University law school. Very stimulating it was too.

A few things that stood out
- freedom of information is not designed to stop discussions and policy formulation

- some countries have had FOI for a long time - New Zealand has just celebrated 25 years

But the worrying quote was this; ‘the problem with the Child Index and Identity cards is that things can go wrong and they will…’

The purpose of the Children’s Index is to collect information about every child in the country. Will this lead to better housing? smaller classrooms? more youth centres? some imaginative ways to engage with the full range of what being a child means? I very very much doubt it.

While Richard (who argued in the government select committee against the proposals) was talking it made me think of WG Sebald’s book ‘The Natural History of Destruction’. In this, he puts forward the thesis that towards the end of the second world war, the reason why the allied air bombing continued was because no one really knew how to stop it and the scale of investment in bombers, bombs, pilots, radar and so on created a pressure on government to keep using this tactic. To the point where even Churchill cried stop as he realised that the war was going to end within weeks and there would be a huge problem of housing the German people if all the cities had been destroyed (although the treatment of the German population and the surrendered armed forces was often shocking- another event air brushed from history).

I digress. What it made me think was that the government wants to collect all this data because they have invested so heavily in the infrastructure. I don’t believe for two seconds that this is really going to improve the welfare, or even safety, of children. Changing the brutal environment that many children find themselves in just might.