Joined‐up government and privacy in the United Kingdom: managing tensions between data protection and social policy. Part I
| Author | Perri 6,Christine Bellamy,Charles Raab |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-3298.2005.00440.x |
Public Administration Vol. 83 No. 1, 2005 (111–133)
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005, 9600 Garsi ngton Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
JOINED-UP GOVERNMENT AND PRIVACY
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: MANAGING
TENSIONS BETWEEN DATA PROTECTION
AND SOCIAL POLICY. PART I
PERRI 6, CHARLES RAAB AND CHRISTINE BELLAMY
The Labour government that came to power in the United Kingdom in 1997 made
much of its commitment to ‘joined-up working’, by which it meant horizontal inte-
gration between policies and co-ordination across services. The particular manner in
which it pursued this commitment has led to growing pressure for the sharing of
citizens’ personal information among public service agencies. Yet at the same time,
Parliament was engaged in implementing the European Data Protection Directive
with a new Data Protection Act and the Government was honouring its manifesto
commitment to bring the European Convention on Human Rights – including its
enshrined right to private life – into domestic law. Government has therefore been
obliged to find ways of managing the potential tension between these commitments.
There are two analytically distinct dimensions to the arrangements through which
this is being attempted. First, the horizontal dimension consists in initiatives that
apply across all policy fields, and includes the establishment of cross-governmental
guidelines for implementing data protection law as well as the development
of national policy on sharing personal data between public services. In 2002, the
government published a major policy paper on data sharing and privacy. By late
2003, its approach to the need for legislation had changed sharply. The second
analytically distinct dimension, the vertical dimension, consists in the laws, codes
and norms developed in specific policy fields to govern relationships between data
sharing and privacy within those fields.
This two-part article discusses these arrangements. Part I analyses the horizontal
dimension of the governance of data sharing and privacy. Part II (published in the
next issue) examines the vertical dimension in three fields in which tensions between
data sharing and privacy have come to the fore: community safety, social security
and NHS health care. Four options for the governance of data sharing and privacy
are analytically distinguished: (1) seeking to make the two commitments consistent
or even mutually reinforcing; (2) mitigating the tensions with detailed guidelines for
implementation; (3) allowing data sharing to take precedence over privacy; and (4)
allowing privacy to take precedence over data sharing. The article argues that, des-
pite its strong assertion of (1), the government has, in practice, increasingly sought to
pursue option (2) and that, in consequence, the vertical dimension has become much
more important in shaping the relationship than the horizontal dimension. The
articles argue, however, that option (2) is a potentially unstable strategy as well as
being unsustainable.
Perri 6 is Professor of So cial Policy in the Graduate School in the College of Bus iness, Law and Social
Sciences at Nottingham Trent University. Charles Raab is Professor of Government in the School of
Social and Political Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Christine Bellamy is Professor of Public
Administration and Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies) at Nottingham Trent University.
112 PERRI 6, CHARLES RAAB AND CHRISTINE BELLAMY
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005
INTRODUCTION
On comi ng to power i n 1997, the L abour Gover nment in the United King dom
inherited a legal responsibility to enact into domestic law the provisions of
the 1995 European Union Directive on data protection (95/46/EC). This
responsibility was fulfilled with the passage of the Data Protection Act
(DPA) 1998 as the successor to the Data Protection Act 1984. The incoming
government also brought with it a manifesto commitment to domesticate
the European Convention of Human Rights, including the right to privacy
enshrined in Article 8. This commitment was secured by the passage of the
Human Rights Act 1998. It its first year in office, however, the new govern-
ment also became quickly committed to more horizontal co-ordination and
better integration of public services, under the slogan ‘joined-up govern-
ment’ (Newman 2001; 6 et al. 2002; Sullivan and Skelcher 2002). There may
be some reasons to fe ar that some p ractices of joining up pu blic service s may
be at odds with the very rights to privacy that were enacted in these Acts.
Co-ordinated approaches to government – including ones that make
heavy use of information resources – and a stronger emphasis on data pro-
tection and confidentiality need not be incompatible objectives. Why, then,
has tension so clearly appeared since 1997? In this article we seek to show
that three important forces are at work. First, privacy and human rights
issues have achieved heightened political and statutory presence. Second,
effective data protection practices are widely regarded as the sine qua non of
building popular trust and confidence in e-commerce and e-government, and
thus as a significant source of competitive advantage in the global e-economy.
This view was influential in the passage of the EU Directive in 1995 (Raab,
1998) and has been strongly emphasized within public services. Third,
Labour’s approach to public service integration is particularly dependent on
new, joined-up information flows, many of which involve data that refer
directly to, or that may be traced to, identifiable individuals.
Several aspects of policy serve to illustrate this last, extremely important,
point. One is that the government has committed itself to a huge extension
of online service provision and transaction processing, including 100 per
cent availability of online services by 2005. It has brought forward legislation
for identity cards (Secretary of State for the Home Department, 2002, 2003;
House of Commons 2004) and backed a project to develop a single register
of British citizens to support these proposals (Office of National Statistics,
2003a, b). Data sharing is also being strongly encouraged by several mutu-
ally-reinforcing features of UK social policy. These include the development
of social intervention programmes involving a focus on extremely small
neighbourhoods, groups or individuals; a shift towards holistic, multi-
agency approaches to such interventions; the establishment of ambitious
social policies at a time of continuing resource constraint; government’s
response to administrative discretion in a policy context calling for more
finely-judged selectivity; and the desire to base interventions on more pre-
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