Opinion

posted on 15 July 2008 08:43

The Detica Group, an information research consultancy, claims the UK could be left behind by the rest of Europe in cross-border information sharing.

This means that non-Brit Europeans travelling into Britain and Brits crossing into mainland Europe could be disadvantaged in access to public services because their information stays at home when they travel abroad.

An Anthony Golledge from Detica's Government division, said: "In our increasingly mobile world, cross-border travel is now fast becoming the norm, particularly in Europe with the free labour market. From a public services perspective, personal information needs to be equally mobile and travel with people across borders so that authorities can determine their entitlement to benefits such as healthcare. In the UK, we are being held back by public debate and concerns over data protection, which means that information sharing initiatives are seen as threats to our personal privacy."

Concerns over data protection ... would that be because UK govrnment departments have exposed some 30 million UK citizens to identity theft because of unscheduled data sharing experiments involving the random loss of unencrypted CDs?

Detica states there are growing concerns about the exploitation of UK public services by international fraudsters — such as in the 'health tourism' trend — which place further demands on over-stretched Government budgets and the total cost of the service to taxpayers. A confidential report for the Department of Health, released last year under the Freedom of Information Act, estimated that the UK lost £30m in unrecovered debts from foreign visitors in 2004. Detica argues that plugging the UK's 'information sharing gap' quickly will help to address some of these loopholes.

In other words UK gov, get an IT grip, get your IT act together and join the modern age.

Golledge said: "We need to find ways to carefully 'open up' our benefits databases and healthcare records systems. If we get left behind, the risks are two-fold. Firstly, UK citizens will find it more difficult to get public services in Europe — such as healthcare — to which they are entitled. Secondly, information sharing between these databases and IT systems helps us close the loopholes that fraudsters can exploit to use public services like the NHS for free. Clearly, sharing information across borders to improve services and spot the digital footprints that are strong indicators of fraud or abuse will involve making some trade-offs between security and privacy, but we need to act quickly."

People may well think that so long as UK gov demonstrably is incapable of balancing security and privacy concerns in its own domestic IT the very last thing it should do is countenance opening them up to cross-border access by other state's systems.

US B&F visitors may ask whether the US government should share its citizen's data with Mexico. That's the sort of issue being discussed here. As Europe now includes ex-communist eastern Europe countries with creaking and rudimentary IT infrastructures, the idea of sharing sensitive state citizen data with them could cause raised eyebrows.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}