IT glitches are threatening the security of the Contactpoint
child database.
The internet database will hold the personal details of every
child in the UK, and will be accessed by hundreds of thousands of
workers involved in child protection.
It is supposed to have a shielding system preventing users from
seeing details on victims of domestic violence, children in witness
protection programmes and those involved in difficult
adoptions.
Most children will have their names, addresses, dates of birth,
and school, GP and social services details. Users should only be
able to see the name, sex and age of a shielded child.
But local authority staff have found that the system does not
always work while they were uploading information onto the
database, the
Times reported.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has
ordered a pause in the data upload while engineers investigate the
problems.
In some cases, adopted children who should be shielded are
listed on the database under their former surname and their
adoption surnames. The two are then linked. It means abusive
parents who had their children removed from them could track them
down to their new adoptive families.
There are also problems with other major databases that
Contactpoint links to. Every time the Department of Work and
Pensions, for example, updates its central information on child
benefits, the shielding on vulnerable children disappears. All
their information becomes available on a duplicate record that
somehow gets created.
Contactpoint was one of the projects singled out for criticism
in a recent report looking at the
legality of the UK's major databases. It has suffered a
series of setbacks with launch dates being postponed due to
technical problems.