New plot to share your private data across Whitehall

PERSONAL information on the lives of every person in Britain could be passed around between government departments, quangos, town halls and even private firms under new powers buried in the Queen’s Speech.

Wide-ranging powers will permit collections of bulk data from bodies such as HM Revenue & Customs, the DVLA and hundreds of others to be shared elsewhere in government.

Ministers say the measures will help improve the efficiency of the public sector and could save billions. But one privacy campaigner said the move amounted to a vast data grab. Sam Smith, from MedConfidential, added that ‘ministers are driving a coach and horses through basic privacy rights’.

And Guy Herbert, of personal privacy campaign group NO2ID, suggested it was a Whitehall coup that reprised controversial data sharing powers abandoned by Labour because they were described as creating a ‘snooping state’.

The measures are in the Digital Economy Bill, which is mainly concerned with extending broadband across the country. It will create a new mechanism for the huge amounts of information, including personal data, to be transferred in bulk to other parts of the public sector.

Ministers will put in law which bodies can share data, and the broad reasons why. At no point will any individual be able to object to their data being shared, or asked for consent.

A policy paper suggests the measures will include a wide range of public bodies and could even include companies and charities carrying out public functions for councils.

It warns that when sharing data – which may or may not be anonymised – it will not be ‘practicable to obtain the consent of each individual’.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said claims of a data grab were inaccurate and ‘misrepresent the proposals which seek very specific outcomes such as helping people trapped in fuel poverty’. Central to the plans ‘are safeguards to make sure all data is handled in line with our responsibilities as a government’.