§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Rossi.]
§ 4.3 p.m.
§ Mr. Leslie Huckfield (Nuneaton)I am grateful for this opportunity to raise what I believe to be an extremely important subject—in fact, it is really too important to be left till this hour of the day.
The Parliamentary Secretary will know that I am no "computer Luddite". I accept that computer technology is here with us. It is more a question of adapting the computer to be our servant and adapting modern technology to take its place within a legislative framework rather than getting rid of that technology. I offer this debate as a nice little nonparty topic with which to end the week.
I regard this as the first test case in the data-bank society and I hope that my remarks, and those of the Minister, will be studied not only by hon. Members but by local authorities throughout the country, and particularly by the seven which are especially concerned through their proposal to build computerised profiles on 600,000 children. I am referring to the county councils of Flintshire, Leeds, Denbighshire, Liverpool, Teesside, West Sussex and Cheshire. This is to be done under the auspices of the National Computing Centre.
I should like to begin with a quotation from Oscar Ruebhausen, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, which has been concerned with this problem. He says:
Modern science has introduced a new dimension into the issues of privacy. There was a time when among the strongest allies of privacy were the inefficiency of man, the fallibility of his memory, and the healing compassion that accompanied both the passing of time and the warmth of human recollection. These allies are now being put to rout. Modern science has given us the capacity to record faithfully, to maintain permanently, to retrieve promptly, and to communicate both widely and instantly, in authentic sound or pictures or in simple written records, any act or event or data of our choice. Technology can now transform what participants believed were private experiences into public events.It is certainly that category into which this proposal falls.949 May I at the same time declare an interest in that I had before this House earlier in this Session my own Control of Personal Information Bill which would have dealt adequately with these issues. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the National Computing Centre is not directly involved as an authority in this proposal. It is, in fact, acting as some kind of catalyst. It has carried out a feasibility study and has decided that information for these local authorities might be said to be desirable under five heads—teachers, pupils, buildings and supplies, curricula and finance. Ideally, each local authority would have a centralised computer system. At the moment this proposal is at the stage of the working party. Doubts have already been raised by teachers' representatives about the subjectivity of some of the information, and when I talked with the National Computing Centre in London on Tuesday I was told that as yet some of the more intimate privacy and confidentiality issues have not been studied in detail.
I turn to the proposal to build computerised profiles of 600,000 schoolchildren by these local authorities—an issue which I am sure the Under-Secretary agrees with me ought to concern the pupils, the parents, the teachers and the local authority representatives in all of these areas and in many such local authorities which are bound soon to follow.
If I may list some of the privacy issues with which I believe the N.C.C. and this House ought to be concerned, we have first the fact that many of the assessments made by teachers for these records could be very subjective. I understand that Liverpool as an authority has already dropped this part of the proposal because the information was regarded as too sensitive. Then we had the difficulties in testing and recording I.Q.s. Perhaps the most controversial section of the proposal is the fact that local authorities have expressed with varying degrees of keenness their desire to maintain records of home background. They want to know something about births, parental background, children's habits and this kind of thing. I understand that there are one or two local authorities like Portsmouth which have got as far as maintaining some kind of "risk register" of children who could be "poten- 950 tial health hazards", if I may use that expression, or who in some way are not quite normal as the computer might reveal.
It is this kind of thing which will be a very controversial area when it comes to filing this information on a computer. There are, in addition, all the usual issues raised by the onset of the Databank Society of the accessibility and the confidentiality of data.
If I could add some of my own issues which I believe the N.C.C. ought to be considering in addition to those which the working party has already been considering, I would mention the potential which will be given under this proposal to local authorities already with spare computer capacity to integrate these files with the other files on rents, rates, property, public health data and even credit status which some local authorities are already recording. In fact, I submit that there is a real risk that, with the addition of this category of information, the computer print-out of an individual can become more real than the individual himself.
Such computer proposals are, in addition to this, subject to all the normal risks of the mobility of personnel in the computer industry—an industry which has a very high personnel mobility. They carry all their secrets with them. We have already had the birth of a new generation of "computer burglars". B.O.A.C. has suffered, and there has been a case at the Old Bailey. We have all the usual difficulties of access control and audit controls. In this area I have always worked on the assumption that since the necessary safeguards which I should like to see adopted will cost money some legislation is necessary. That is why in February I introduced my Control of Personal Information Bill.
The Russell Sage Foundation conference in New York in May, 1969, went further than the working parties on the N.C.C. proposal. This is some reflection of the fact that American practice in application is already perhaps some two or three years ahead of this country. Among the potential privacy issues listed by the Foundation was first: to what extent should details from pupil's and teacher's records be released? There is an article in "Today's Education" of May this year by Mrs. Vivian Stewart 951 Teitelbaum, to whom I am indebted for much of the information I am using today. She revealed that, out of 54 American school districts asked, 43 allowed teachers to use all the files they had on pupils; 31 allowed schools nurses to do so; 29 allowed the F.B.I, and C.I.A. to do so; and 18 allowed the local police to do so. In contrast, only eight gave that right to parents and only five to students. Some States have even gone so far as to make consultation between pupils and pupil counsellors have privileged status in law.
The Russell Sage Foundation also raised the issue of to what extent pupils and parents should know that information is being gathered and to what extent they should enjoy the right of verification. These are issues that the N.C.C. should be considering because unverified information can cause damage for life. It can ruin a whole career.
The Russell Sage Foundation also said that there should be proper destruction procedures. Will they be used when the child reaches 21 or should they be used before? Unless we inaugurate the correct destruction procedures on computer files we shall rapidly become "the one-chance society ". If a child does anything wrong at school, that will figure on his record for the rest of his life. Every man in the world should be able to have the chance of a fresh start.
Apart from that, we must have a guarantee of protection not only from semi-authorised access but from completely unauthorised access. I am thinking of the credit bureaux, the detective agencies and some of the recent practices revealed in the Guardian, allegations into which the Prime Minister has already appointed an inquiry. The Russell Sage Foundation went further, in proposing that information stored on computer profiles should be categorised. It listed its categories as: first, information without which the school system would find it difficult to function, such as examination records; second, all verified information like health data which is not absolutely essential to the running of the school system; third, all useful but very personal information like personality tests which is not essential and which I believe merits the greatest degree of protection. As we 952 move from the first category to the third more and more parental consent should be sought.
In a first endeavour to deal with this need for consent, the N.C.C. should be considering, if not the giving of individual consent for each authorised access to the files, at least that some kind of representative consent should be given either by, for example, parent teacher associations—I know that that is a controversial procedure—or school governors, or local councillors. But we must have a consent procedure. In each school system there should be someone responsible for the establishment of procedures for review and verification. Moreover, information should be collected in such a way that only the basic minimum data is recorded on the record card. All other information should be systematically reviewed and in many cases destroyed.
Parents must be given full access to all the files on their children. I believe most strongly that no agency or personnel not directly concerned with the child should have access to pupil data without either parental or pupil consent. My Bill would have seen to all this, but unfortunately it will not get on to the Statute Book this Session. I only hope that I shall have the opportunity to introduce a similar Bill in the next Session.
All this will cost money. The Minister knows this as well as anyone in the computer industry does. But if we are to protect the traditional, accepted standards of privacy and confidentiality in this country, which are among the reasons why I like living in this country, we must pay for them. Much can be done with existing systems and existing staff and personnel. We do not have to lavish out large sums of money to build in safety procedures from the start. The computer can bring a new type of security that conventional manual and manilla data banks cannot offer. But once the computer is tampered with and unauthorised access is gained it is possible to glean much more information.
There is much pressure from local parents' associations for schools to be made far more responsive to the local community; there is much pressure for consultations between parents and teachers to grow. Such procedures could 953 be a first-class vehicle for the establishment of better teacher-parent and pupil relations. Without them I can foresee a very serious deterioration in some of those relationships.
This is our first chance—it is certainly the N.C.C.'s first chance—to tackle the issues raised by the databank society head on. The responsibility rests with local councillors, school governors and Members of this House, and not only with the Younger Committee. The whole world will watch the way in which Britain tackles the matter, because the problem will be raised the world over. If we fail in this I can foresee that we shall take another step on the road to the complete Goldfish Bowl Society.
§ 4.18 p.m.
§ The Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Mr. David Price)In attempting to answer the many and far-reaching points raised by the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr. Huckfield), I want to make it clear that we in the Department of Trade and Industry have only an indirect connection with the subject matter of this Adjournment debate. That applies also to the Department of Education and Science.
I want to spend a moment explaining why that is. Let us take, first the National Computing Centre. Of course it receives an annual grant in aid on our Departmental Vote, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry appoints the Chairman and five of the other 11 members of the Council, which is the governing body of the N.C.C. Its programme of work is under the policy direction of this Council and its committees. There is no formal provision for the Department, let alone my right hon. Friend, to exercise any independent direction in any way. Naturally, however, we keep ourselves informed of its activities.
Briefly, the N.C.C.'s responsibility is to promote an increased and more effective use of computers in every field of national and commercial activity. Its role is to provide services, assistance, advice and information to users or manufacturers of computers or other services, whether or not they are members of the Centre. Therefore, the House will see that the N.C.C.'s primary role is catalytic, rather than executive.
954 The responsibilities of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science with regard to the matters raised by the hon. Gentleman are equally limited. With the exception of the universities, executive responsibility for the education service lies with the local education authorities. That is laid down in the famous Section 8 of the 1944 Education Act.
This means that the Secretary of State does not normally intervene in the day-to-day running of the schools or in local authority administration of the education service. The collection and recording of information about pupils falls into this category. Accordingly, my right hon. Friend's Department has not been actively involved in the project under discussion today.
Having made clear my very limited responsibilities in this matter, I wish to be as helpful as I can to the hon. Member, because he raised important matters.
I should say that many of the questions that he directed to the N.C.C. should be directed to the local education authorities. I believe that he acknowledges that. It might not be unfair to say that we sometimes have to direct our questions not necessarily to the right Authority in order to get them within the rules of order of the House.
I should like to remind the House of the story behind the problem raised by the hon. Member. In 1968 the Flintshire Local Education Authority asked the N.C.C. for advice on how the computer could be used to assist the Flintshire L.E.A. in its work. It was as a result of a preliminary study carried out in response to this approach that it was realised that to obtain the full benefits of computerisation a wide-ranging approach to the rationalisation of information flow was needed.
It was therefore decided to widen the area of the study and to obtain the cooperation of a wider cross section of local education authorities. Six more local authorities were invited into the scheme together with the Local Authorities Management Services and Computer Committee, which in all these matters has a key rôle to play. These eight bodies and the N.C.C. are now co-operating in a study—I want the hon. Member to mark my words carefully— 955 to establish the feasibility of an education information system which will embrace all aspects of education within the purview of the local education authority—pupils, teachers, buildings, equipment and finance.
The project is under the direction of a Steering Committee which contains a senior representative of each participating body; the N.C.C. project team provides the computer expertise—neither more nor less. The policy of the project lies in the hands of the steering committee—and co-ordination and working groups in each L.E.A. provide the administrative and professional educational input to the study.
It is clear from what the hon. Member has said that his anxieties centre on the educational input rather than the computer expertise. The primary objective of the project is to produce a specification for a comprehensive information system to meet the present and future requirements for the effective administration of the education service. Such a system, if successful, would be available to all local education authorities to use when they wish.
It is envisaged that the total system will consist of a number of interdependent modules. The first module of the total system which is being studied is that concerned with pupil records which are kept by all L.E.A.S in one form or another, to meet both individual educational needs and straightforward administration.
The seven local authorities have provided to the N.C.C. project team the sub-headings under which information concerning pupils is currently held. This is entirely the responsibility of education authorities and not of N.C.C.
This is the starting point for the feasibility study into how much information should be stored and how it should be organised both in the interests of the individual pupil and parents and the administration of the local education service.
A primary consideration in the study is the confidentiality of the data, its access authority and, furthermore, how long the data should be retained. There can be no question, as has been suggested in some newspaper reports, of 956 the N.C.C. telling the L.E.A.s what information concerning pupils they should keep, far less the N.C.C. circulating pupils with highly personal questionnaires for a pilot study or any other purpose.
The N.C.C.s rôle is that of co-ordinator and professional computer adviser, not educational adviser. It is a rôle it exercises in many spheres of public and commercial interest in the furtherance of its general aim.
In the final analysis it will be the local education authorities participating in the study who will decide what information should go into the computerised data banks and what security procedures should operate. They, I am sure, will give due and proper attention to four important matters.
First, what information needs to be collected about pupils and what is unnecessary; secondly, who should have access to the information—the hon. Gentleman adumbrated a little on this point—thirdly, how long it should be stored; and, fourthly, how it will be kept confidential.
It should be emphasised that no decisions have been taken by the authorities concerned in the present exercise, and that they are well aware of the possible pitfalls and of the need to secure the co-operation of teachers and parents. The Director of Education for Flintshire, the authority which originally approached the National Computing Centre is quoted in this week's "Education ", the journal to which the hon. Gentleman referred, as saying:
It is only a feasibility exercise, an academic exercise, at the moment. The likelihood of our using the system is extremely doubtful, even in an amended form. No information system is of value unless it gets the wholehearted co-operation of teachers and parents, otherwise you might as well forget about the system".I hope that this will be of some assurance to the hon. Gentleman. The assurance is not on my authority, but on that quotation from one of the participating authorities in the exercise.I should like to take this opportunity of correcting what I think is a fairly common misunderstanding about the comparative security and confidentiality of manually maintained records as against computerised records. It is seldom 957 that information which finds its way into a computerised data bank is new information in the sense that it is not already on file in some more conventional form, legible and intelligible to anyone who can read the Queen's English and who, by accident or design, gains access to the filing cabinet where the files are kept.
We are discussing the whole question of the kind of information which ought to be held by public authorities, whether computerised or not. This is a far wider subject than we can go into today, but I note its great importance.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for drawing the attention of the House to this 958 range of problems. I conclude by emphasising that it relates to the propriety and confidentiality of records as a whole rather than to the use of the computer to store them per se. I acknowledge that the enormous improvement in the efficiency of data handing represented by the computer focuses our attention—perhaps it should have been drawn before—on the need for adequate precautions more sharply than hitherto. I suggest that the problem is not therefore peculiar to the computer, but is general.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at twenty-nine minutes past Four o'clock.