The Home Office has said that joining up existing government systems reduces the need for new, large databases.
The Home Office made the claim in an official response to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee's A Surveillance Society? report. The response states that the government has no ambition to build such a society.
"The government does not recognise such a scenario and it is not an ambition that such a state should be in place," the response states.
On the committee's recommendation that government should "curb the drive to collect more personal information and establish larger databases", the Home Office cited the example of the Police National Database (PND), which will not involve a new operational database but will open and link existing datasets, avoiding the need for data to be copied or collected again.
"Even so, we are very conscious of the potential privacy issues this raises," the response states, noting that a consultation has been held, and that this will feed into a privacy impact assessment by the National Policing Improvement Agency. The agency is aiming to complete the assessment on the first phase of the PND by the end of this year and will publish the results.
The response also includes the government's acceptance of a specific recommendation that data held on patients or children for protection purposes must not be used for predictive profiling of future criminal behaviour. The response states that the Home Office has set up an implementation team to deliver on the findings of the recent reviews of data protection and security. The Home Office expects to complete this work by September 2009.
The response notes that the prime minister has already accepted the committee's recommendation that the information commissioner should report annually to Parliament on surveillance, that the government should respond and that Parliament should then hold a debate. The response also accepts the need to make full use of encryption and privacy-enhancing technologies, pointing to the Cabinet Office review of data handling published in June.
On the committee's key recommendation of personal data minimisation, the response states that the Cabinet Office review of data handling by Sir Gus O'Donnell insisted that all departments issue an information charter, and that the standard prototype for this includes a promise to "ask only for what we need, and not to collect too much or irrelevant information".
More generally, the response defends the government's approach to personal data. "The government does not believe in the mass collection of personal data," it states. "The principle of data minimisation had been followed in the design of the [National Identity Register], which will hold very similar information to the current passport database."
The report adds that the National Identity Register will mostly be used to authenticate individuals — confirming they are who they say they are — after they are enrolled, adding: "Only in very limited circumstances will identification searches be permitted as regulated by the [Identity Cards] Act."
The report states that biometric information will be encrypted, and that "very few staff will be able to see full records, and these will be treated as highly protectively marked".
