ContactPoint was set up after the official report into the death of Victoria Climbié. Lord Laming concluded that the eight-year-old’s murder could have been prevented had there been better communication between professionals.

Communication is not the same as broadcasting or publication. There is a sense of checks and balances between the participants in a communication. This is rarely apparent in stores of data offered to people on the basis of the role they undertake.
As Tom Fuller points out persons having a particular role are not necessarily to be trusted with the information. There will be inevitable bad eggs present in teaching; medical; legal; social work professions; and the police. Also leakage of information which should be private to the individual can occur from simple careless behaviour of otherwise trustworthy individuals. Sadly, assigning information access rights to a role (for example, head-teacher), does not prevent individual head-teachers delegating that responsibility to a temporary secretary which is probably not how the legislators or system designers saw the ‘database’ being acceptable.[http://davethinkingaloud.blogspot.com/2007/08/safety-fears-over-new-register-of-all.html]

These information sharing initiatives are usually there for a legitimate purpose, but there is always a degree of risk around who gets access. In my view most of those (high 90%s) who get to see the info will have a legitimate reason and behave responsibly. There is a small number who will get sloppy, and an even smaller number who will deliberately abuse the system. It’s important that there are disciplinary and, when necessary, legal sanctions against those who do so ….. taken in all of the cases you’ve highlighted.

It’s also important that you balance the risk of misuse/abuse against the intended benefits, which is always a value judgement. You can take the absolutist view, common in the privacy lobby, that there is something suspicious or dangerous about all information sharing initiatives – a view that is always amplified around children and vulnerable people – but that entails doing nothing, and living with the failings that lead to events like the Victoria Climbie case.

Let’s be honest with ourselves that there’s an element of risk in any course of action, and decide what is the acceptable level. The challenge is to assess this calmly and measure it against what can be achieved by such initiatives.