The Business of Government Goes On

A case for Incapacity Benefit

As appalling as it has been for the country, at least the tenure of Brown as PM has had the benefit of bringing a little unpredictability to British politics. Every time you think that the very nadir of competence and honesty has been reached, it seems that the bar can be lowered further.

Reaction to Conservative proposals on benefit reform has though been much more traditional fare where it has been scarcely worth the wear and tear on the contact lenses to read the reaction from the Government, Lib Dems and various interest groups, so predictable has it been.

As the The Guardian succinctly summarises the policy:

Controversial proposals to remove benefits for three years from people who refuse their third offer of a job are to be announced by the Conservatives tomorrow.

Source: The Guardian

I don't really think any sane person would believe that having 2.6 million on incapacity benefits at a time when, we are told we need vast swathes of immigration to fill jobs is remotely a tenable position, but this is a benefits issue, an area rarely illuminated in the glare of common sense.

It would appear that in some cases 'conservative_benefit_change_response.doc' has simply been attached to the appropriate distribution list and e-mailed without even reading the proposal, as seems to be the case with mental health charity Mind:

A spokeswoman for Mind, the mental health charity, said: "David Cameron needs to bear in mind the 40% of IB claimants who have mental health problems.

"Continuing stigma and discrimination also means many employers will not hire people with mental health problems."

Source: The Guardian

To help out what appears to be a very overworked Mind spokeswoman, I shall underline the key phrase: "refuse their third offer of a job". Listen, think, speak...it really does help.
Even the access to a large support staff is no guarantee of successful critique though, as Peter Hain demonstrates admirably in the same article:

"Their plans to interview 2.6 million people would also be prohibitively expensive."

Source: The Guardian

OK, so interviewing 2.6 million, even in the unlikely event that there isn't some simple pre-filtering that can be done on this number, with the real likelihood of making some compensating cost savings is prohibitively expensive, where as interviewing the entire adult population of the country for their ID card, for negligible gain other than in satisfaction to bureaucrat egos is not?

While we are on the subject of Hain and unhealthy orange glows, what do the Lib Dems think? Some bold blue-sky thinking coming down from their new leader? A realisation that welfare reform is possibly one area where they could be an honest broker in real change? No, they are still the party of 'real opposition', at least to anything that the government opposes:

Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman Danny Alexander said: "Once again, the Tories have missed the point about welfare reform. Millions of sick and disabled people want to work, but the government has failed to provide the tailored support they need to find a job."

Source: The Guardian

Let's be fair to Alexander, not only is he one of the more honest people in UK politics bearing his surname, but he is right to point out that the plans on a carrot side could do with a bit more fleshing out, but in general it seems that he too has missed the point that the proposal applies only to those who have rejected job offers, not those unable to get such an offer. There is still the implicit presumption against any application of the stick, anyone who listens to one end of the claimants involved in their willing acceptance of life on the taxpayers' payroll should realise that both are desperately needed.

Looking at the numbers involved and the high bar set for having benefits withdrawn it does appear to be a modest proposal. Personally I'd love to see a more ambitious target and for each and every penny saved over the basic target to fund an increase in Incapacity Benefits so those who are genuinely unable to work, for reasons physical or mental, can live the kind of dignified life that a modern society like ours should be able to offer once the abuse is stopped.

It's the Issues Wot Count

50 Million Tiny Millstones

There have been so many polls to comment on of late, but most convey the same message about changing attitudes to our current government. I enjoy these as much as the next man who has deep concerns about the man at the top; feelings which I never had to the same degree about the Blair administration, but ones that more and more I find others have come to share.

The classic response from the Brownites is "ahh, but it's the issues that ordinary people really care about". Well, for a start that is now nothing more than an assertion of dubious provenance, not really an argument. I know many people significantly more left leaning and less attuned to the day-to-day goings on in Westminster than myself who are starting to worry about the kind of mood music that drifts out from the Brown Camp. More than that though, it's the kind of statement that assumes that not only is the policy fundamentally right, but that ordinary people agree with that assessment, with the airy complacency and arrogance of the current government that more and more are coming to detest.

On one policy, that Brown could so easily have ditched, with nothing but credit to himself for doing so, it may be that he has made another major misjudgement. It was without surprise, but with pleasure nonetheless I read the report of the first YouGov poll showing a majority of Britons who oppose the ID Card/National Identity Register scheme. True, this comes after the HMCE data scandal(s), but it also comes well before the real costs start to hit the wallet directly and before such joys as a trip to the registration centre become an everyday reality. It's hard to see anything other than a ratchet on this one, as the unsustainable arguments in favour of the scheme wilt in the sunlight, just as even the practical objections alone to the scheme begin to ripen in the public's mind.

I suspect Brown doesn't really care one way or the other about ID cards on a personal level, but saw it as a 'tough and decisive' buoyancy aid to his premiership. There's really not been much in the smoke signals about what he believes about this subject, and frankly it would be odd if even the most political of beasts didn't really have the occasional "frankly I don't give a damn" issue where you just try to read the polling runes. In this type of analysis though, it may well come to pass for Brown that this buoyancy aid may increasingly seem more like a rather large and costly millstone. It couldn't happen to a nicer bloke.

As for the government line that the HMCE data fiasco is in fact an argument in favour of handing more data to the government, I'm frankly too tired to give it the contemptuous treatment it truly deserves.

I haven't even tried (and nor has any minister as far as I can see) to understand the argument they are peddling. Are they really saying that for every piddling little transaction we must present ourselves for our biometrics to be checked (no phone banking, no use of your plastic on the Internet, even if unconcerned about the government having such detailed information on our day-to-day lives anyway)?

Or is it simply a case of poorly informed, inadequate political figureheads spouting what institutionalised civil service mindsets, befuddled by the sales pitches that I know the major consultancies can cook up, tell them to say?

The intellectual incoherence of the government line on the subject is offensive enough even before consideration of whether it springs from politically motivated dishonesty or simple inadequacy.

Technical Notes #1 - Personal Data

How NuLab Sees You

OK, it's just 24 billion one day and a mere 25 million the next, but you couldn't say that life in the treasury team is exactly dull at the moment.

IT is boring. I earn my living from it, and at times it is a good living, but there is precious little joy in it. I can't get excited by the Wintel v Mac v Linux kind of debates that crop up from time to time on blogs and the like, and to be honest I could probably make a good argument on any given side of that sort of thing that I was dumped on. I write this on an amazingly good value Wintel laptop, I'm amazed by the 'bang for bucks' I can get out of the linuxy hosting platform I do the Facebook stuff on for £50 a year, and Apple stuff, at the very least, looks as if it deserves a place in design museums around the world from the moment it is released. I like it all, I hate it all

I normally steer well clear of the whole subject unless I get 'tired and emotional'. For all of that, I think to most people with experience of large 'customer' (and the term was used in the Commons about those on HMCE's systems even if it sounds a bit perverse - surely HMCE is the customer) databases there must be several points in Darling's explanation of the whole affair that must sound shocking.

My own company holds copies of databases, some with several million records of individuals that are used to help respectable companies develop and maintain their systems. It is more likely than not that anybody reading this article would appear on one of them. Ask me which though and I could not tell you, because, before they were given to me, any piece of information that could possibly identify you was removed. No addresses, everyone lives at 'A Street, B Town, C County, XX1 1XX' and you are called 'M/s Customer XXXXXX', your date of birth is the '01/01/1900' and your National Insurance Number is 'AB123456C'. Even this is only handed over after a debate over the necessity of such a handover and the terms under which I received this copy would be clearly defined and make me contractually obliged to treat even this obfuscated data with the same respect as if I was an employee of the company who legitimately hold the original version.

I could not bypass this. Systems such as those I work on, let alone those overpriced government solutions do not have, as a rule, a menu option that says 'copy all customer data to 2 CDs'. The hypothetical junior civil servant at whose door the fault the latest fiasco can supposedly be laid would have had to have asked for specialist help to produce this data extract. If I went I looking for such an extract with my own customers, the relevant person would have said 'you must be joking'. This is not surprising, I'm only an external consultant, but they would have refused to do it for almost any in-house employee, and, especially in the case of FSA regulated companies, would not even have done it for a director of that company without formal written approval. Even the most junior of database administrators in most companies these days have awareness of the sensitivity of personal data, and have specific authorities granted to refuse to perform certain tasks, even from those whose nominal seniority far exceeds their own.

I encounter this on a daily basis, because it breeds a culture where even much more reasonable requests routinely cause a lot more hassle than they really merit. Fundamentally though, the attitude that gives rise to this kind of irritation also ensures that what happened, apparently so easily, within civil service circles, would be much less likely to occur in large, but not national government scale bodies.

I cannot construct any remotely reasonable scenario in my own mind where the single 'junior civil servant' is anything other than a politically convenient myth, and that there is a bigger problem in terms of the culture surrounding the handling of personal data than even Darling could admit in his humiliating admissions today. While it might superficially sound like something from the pointy tinfoil hat brigade, I cannot really imagine that there would be anything less than half a dozen people responsible directly for this failing. I do not cry 'conspiracy' but rather point to an institutional mindset that would allow these events to happen and, from that cultural failing, the Darling and, perhaps technically in this case his junior ministers, cannot maintain the distance that they currently desperately seek.

I honestly don't know which is the case, but there was little in today's revelations that inspired confidence. Darling waffled on about how he was 'concerned' that all 25 million records were transferred to the auditors when, as he implied, they couldn't possibly audit more than a dozen or so individual cases, which stands in stark contrast to the actual request for anonymized data, which suggests a wholly different kind of higher level statistical analysis.

There is, at least, some more than cold comfort in the whole debacle. I will at least know that the line of 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' next time I argue about the merits or otherwise of ID cards and the National Identity Register can only come from a certifiable imbecile. The case for proceeding with this scheme is now not so much dead, as hung drawn and quartered, and burnt on the brazier afterwards for good measure.

It would be the act of a fool to trundle on down the path we find ourselves on in this regard and while, it is true, it would appear that we have just such a fool occupying Number 10, the sounds of his fragile coalition on this measure disintegrating are music to my ears.

A Question of Breeding

Not here Sedley, sorry.

Today's Telegraph shed's a little light on the ridiculous idea from appeal court judge Stephen Sedley, that every man woman and child should be placed on the national DNA database.

He includes the 32 million or more visitors to the country each year, who in the dreams of Sedley will now have a unique form of welcome to the country, by being swabbed and added to a database of potential criminals. He is apparently unaware that in some of the countries whose citizens choose to visit the UK, the concept of a presumption of innocence still holds the whip hand in determining the relative rights between the individual and the state.

It transpires that:

Unusually - perhaps uniquely for an Appeal Court judge - Lord Justice Sedley is a former member of the Communist Party.

Source: The Daily Telegraph

A little further digging reveals that his father, also in the legal profession, was a lifelong communist who died in 1985.

The understanding that even in the eighties, when the true evil nature of communist regimes was becoming understood, that Sedley was at the least still close to those who were supportive of the aims of the self same regimes that Regan and Thatcher were beginning to fight against, begins to explain his cavalier attitude to individual liberties. It helps us understand why he ruled that a twelve year old, profiled but ruled innocent of any crime, must have his DNA profile held on the national database for the rest of his life; for one of Sedley's background the simple claim of 'necessity' from the state would probably be enough to trump any right to individual dignity.

Supporters of the judge may point to his support for the Human Rights Act. Above and beyond the extra wealth the Act has brought to the legal profession, it should also be remembered that many of the communist states that he probably at one time supported also had similar declarations in their systems of law. The problem was that the simple act of enumerating these rights brought with it the scope to limit and place boundaries round them, and it is clear that in the minds of many from the left that a claim of 'necessity' by the state should carry significantly more weight than I find comfortable in considering the need to abrogate such rights.

On a more practical level, there have been a few back of a fag packet calculations floating around, about the cost of such a scheme, generally coming out at about an initial £10 billion, and then £3 billion per year thereafter. This probably goes some way to explain why our government, which has abandoned any real pretence about caring about our liberties, is only luke warm on another authoratarian measure that would normally be right up it's street.

It should be pointed out that these figures are based on the cost of about £70 to process each test, and would come on top of the already spiralling costs of the ID card and National Identity Register scheme.

As someone with a background in genetics I can't really imagine there would even be any significant scope for the benefit of the scale of Sedley's scheme seeing the £70 figure drop. The processes are already highly automated, and at several key stages rely on natural processes that will only ever happen in their own sweet time, regardless of ministerial exhortations to hit targets for faster processing.

What is more likely is that the cost per sample would increase with the inevitable vast scaling up of the bureaucracy that would certainly be entailed. Furthermore, it is likely that the reliability of, and thereby the confidence in the system would fall off with potentially disastrous results. One only has to look at the well meaning project increasing cancer screening, where the inability to maintain the high quality of those involved in the process, and the delegation of skilled tasks to basic technicians has led to some tragic misdiagnoses.

All in all, this proposal needs killing more firmly, and indeed the campaign to get rid of data on innocent people needs to get underway, now that Sedley has ignited the debate.

Yes, a few guilty people will escape detection, but the number of cases where the DNA of someone previously considered innocent of any crime will be much lower than the already quite small headline total figures on the number of cases solved using any DNA evidence.

This is clearly not a good thing, but the dignity of the individual and the right to live one's life with minimum of interference from the state comes first.

As for Sedley, I could never support McCarthyite purges of those whose political past have shown remarkably bad judgement from the bench, but it important sometimes that we try to understand their past, and concern ourselves with the motivations that may lay behind unacceptable proposals carefully wrapped in a tissue of reasonable sounding words.

Update 1:00AM: Having found broad agreement from the good burghers of the village on Sedley's position, an interesting point was raised over such political interventions by senior judges.

Should, God forbid, another case regarding the retention of DNA evidence ever come before Sedley again, is there any hope whatsoever of a fair trial? He's happy for an innocent 12 year old's DNA to reside on a state database for life, so what hope is there for anyone else?

Any decent, fair minded judge would clearly have to withdraw from such a case having made such a clearly partisan position public.

The big question is whether such concepts as fairness and decency really mean anything to authoritarian scum like Sedley, and perhaps that's the biggest worry of all.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Deranged LunaticLord Justice Sedley

It was with deep revulsion I heard the vile ramblings of Lord Justice Sedley on the subject of the DNA database. The attitudes of some whose role place our fundamental freedoms at the heart of their thinking is becoming extremely troubling to say the least, and once again raises questions over how the judiciary can enter into a public debate without the slightest semblance of accountability.

For those who missed the deranged justice's ramblings, a precis of his theory is as follows.

• DNA evidence makes it possible to convict more criminals, which is a good thing, but...


• There are a disproportionate number of black males on the database, which is a bad thing, therefore...


• Every man, woman and child in the country, including those on even the shortest of visits should be recorded, to make it 'fair' and destigmatise being on the database.

His reasoning for recording everyone's DNA is a logical absurdity of course. Pretty much anyone who gets arrested these days has a DNA sample taken and thereupon end up on the database in perpetuity. If proportionately more black males are on the database than white males this must be because more black men proportionately are being arrested; this may represent an unacceptable state of affairs or it may reflect valid police actions, but it matters not when it comes to rubbishing Sedley's perverted ideas.

As for the stigmatising aspect, yes I would agree there is a stigma attached to being on the database. If you have been convicted of a crime you deserve the stigma. If you are an innocent person against whom no case in law has been proved you do not, and you should be removed from the database. Simply making sure that every person in the country is on the database does not remove the stigma of being treated by the state as a potential criminal in the making.

What next? Going to prison stigmatises, so shall we make everyone spend a token day in prison (if we had the space) to remove that stigma so those that have served their time may have a chance for an easier fresh start?

The government has rejected the idea, however not in the most reassuring of manners, the BBC reports:

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said there were no plans to introduce DNA profiling for everyone in the UK, but "no-one ever says never".

"We're broadly sympathetic to the thrust of what he is saying. [The idea] has logic to it, but I think he's underestimating the practical issues, logistics, civil and ethical issues that surround it," he said.

Source: BBC News

There are 'practical issues, logistics, civil and ethical issues' that surround ID cards and the National Identity Register, and the new NHS IT systems, but this has not dampened this authoritarian governments enthusiasm for treating us all as little more than state property, even if, especially in the case of the former, the benefits of their expensive schemes are limited in the extreme.

There is also an unhelpful contribution from an Association of Black Police Officers spokesman supporting Sedley's brainless position, equally devoid of any serious analysis of the situation he calls 'unacceptable'.

North of the border, the SNP led government, my attitude toward which swings from admiration to disgust on an almost daily basis, is on this subject on the side of the angels, as is often the case when it comes to individual liberties. Again, the BBC reports:

A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: "On 26 June, the justice secretary Kenny MacAskill announced a review of DNA retention in Scotland.

"In announcing the review, Mr MacAskill said that blanket retention was unacceptable in the relationship between the citizen and state.

"The review is expected to begin very shortly."

Source: BBC News

In Scotland, DNA samples taken when people are arrested must be destroyed where no conviction is obtained or no charges laid, with a very limited exception for certain violent crimes. This is a much more satisfactory system, one where people will feel happy to volunteer samples when it may be appropriate in the course of a criminal investigation, knowing that their genetic blueprint will not become state property for ever and all time.

Leaving aside the consideration of whether a true presumption of innocence can exist once a DNA match is made, rightly or wrongly with an individual, does more DNA data mean for a safer society anyway? Have speed cameras made the roads significantly safer? The evidence is equivocal at best. I'm not convinced that having yet more police officers trawling computer databases is the way we want to go, when the day to day crime that blights peoples lives needs more officers on the street to address.

Lord Justice Sedley should take a moment to look at some of the magnificent declaration of his predecessors in defending the rights of the individual against the state, and pause to consider whether he is fit to stand in their shoes. Then, perhaps if he finds himself in an empty room with a shotgun, he could do the decent thing, and make his own personal contribution to the liberty of the British people.

Update 6:00PM: I was surprised nobody had really sunk their teeth into Sedley's suggestion, but it looks like my news feed was just a little delayed, as Thunder Dragon is breathing fire. In his post he highlights the following positive statement from David Davis, the shadow home secretary:

"The erratic nature of this database means that some criminals have escaped having their DNA recorded whilst a third of those people on the database - over a million people - have never been convicted of a crime...

"It is long past time that the Government answered our calls for a Parliamentary debate about this database and to put it on a statutory basis."

Source: The Daily Telegraph

David Davis once again proves that is possible to have a tough attitude to crime, while maintaining a genuine concern for the liberties of the individual.

An Issue of Trust

Jackart, at A Very British Dude has come across a clip which highlights one of the many things going wrong with the police forceservice today:



I quite liked the exhortation in the original posting to "watch this simian thug and the slack-jawed chavette of a sidekick with her hands in her pockets, and tell me the police are the servants of the people". On further reflection though I'm not sure that monkeyboy and chavette are entirely to blame for their stupid mistake of making up fictitious law as they go along. Sadly there does seem to be a change in the attitudes of the police that goes all the way to the top, and it's not entirely surprising that some less able officers at the coalface take their queues from them.

There have been a succession of demands from the police for sweeping new powers, calls that the current government, with its penchant for control freakery, tend to be sympathetic to. Calls for extended powers of detention without trial have been made in a fairly public way, for example. I feel on these type of issues organisations like the Association of Chief Police officers have crossed the line into politics far too often, but at least the debate has been in the public domain. More insidious have been the subtle changes that were lobbied for, and incorporated at the last minute into Acts such as various Criminal Justice Acts, and legislation such as that for ID cards, once the general Media spotlight had dimmed.

A case in point would be the ability of the police to trawl the National Identity Register for fingerprints. In its original form this power was substantially restricted to only case of the direst need; by the time the act was passed most meaningful control had been removed. It followed a similar path down which the regulation of the collection of DNA samples passed some time ago. You can only take samples from those accused of serious arrestable offences? No problem, just wait a while and make nearly all offences arrestable.

Good policing depends on the trust and faith of those being policed. It's a lesson current senior members of the police service have forgotten, other than in the case of specific minority groups. The increasing crass handling of the concerns of people outside of these groups could come at a very heavy price.

When I was in my late twenties I would generally say that most of my peers generally had a great deal of respect for the police, other than the odd bit of frustration over the occasional motoring offence. A decade later, probably at an age where people in times gone by would have been putting aside any youthful distrust of the police, the same kind of reasonable people seem as a whole to have an ever increasing distrust of the service.

A few weeks ago I met a group of friends who were chatting to an off duty police officer in one of the local pubs. He was of our age, and seemed a decent enough bloke, but the feeling of 'them and us' was palpable, even in a midst of as middle a class, law abiding, middle of the road group as you are likely to find anywhere. After he left, the use of certain epithets for his profession that I've always tried to avoid became the norm.

The police need to start to see themselves as others see them, and it's the people at the top who need to open their eyes first, otherwise they will end up with more generations of the type of officer the video clip showed.