ContactPoint "DELAYED"

So reports Kablenet. And a good thing too. Yippee!!!

But it is only a delay. And, needless to say, Goggle-Eyed Balls and his crew are trying to spin that the HMRC debacle is only a very minor consideration in this decision - as pointed out by John Oates here.

A few thoughts come to mind. The Written Statement insists that "ContactPoint will be a simple basic online tool" and seek to allay any anxiety by insisting that "No case information will be held on ContactPoint". As ever these dimwits singularly fail to understand that it is possible to infer a huge amount about any given individual from even the slimmest/most basic biographical data. For example, on their own admission, it will include "an indication as to whether a service or practitioner holds an assessment under the Common Assessment Framework or whether they are a lead professional for that child". Now, it doesn't take a genius to work out that, if an assessing "service", "practitioner" or "lead professional" is identified on the database, it becomes comparatively easy to work out the specific area of concern for/of that child. In other words, his/her data privacy and confidentiality has been circumvented.

In addition I've always struggled to understand how it is that a potential total user-base of 330,000 individuals - no doubt of the same calibre as those at HMRC - generates consistency with or confidence in the reassurance that "only cleared staff subject to the highest level of Criminal Records Bureau checks would be able to access the system". And, bearing in mind how adept Government staff have been at losing their laptops (see here), let us hope that those 330,000 people - I'm sure they're all good souls with no malicious intent!?! - can at least avoid dropping their random number generating tokens down the back of the train seat or what have you!