Whitehall proceeds step-wise, and ever more rapidly, towards an end state of a “Single Government Department”. This is Sir Humphrey’s decades-old vision of “Joined-up Government”, predicated upon Government doing whatever the hell it likes with your data, wherever and however it gets it, in flagrant disregard of Data Protection and Human Rights, Articles 8 and 14 (at least). User needs or departmental needs?

In a world where there’s a single Government (and government) data controller – the Data Controller in Chief; the Prime Minister, the final arbiter – will a single Department’s policies, practices and prejudices determine the list of Government policies?

We don’t see how it doesn’t.

It may be useful to begin with an NHS analogy. It’s a gross simplification, but it carries the necessary meaning.

There are multiple hospitals in Manchester – Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, Manchester Royal Infirmary, and St Mary’s – all on the same site, with interconnected modern buildings, all built at the same time. Why are there three hospitals? Because when the new buildings were constructed, and everything was consolidated on one site, though treating them as a single hospital would seem most sensible, that would (to many people) effectively be “closing two hospitals”. Hence, there are three.

What about Government departments?

In a Britain with a single government department, what is currently the Home Office – with its particular approach (covered elsewhere) – will go on the rampage across all areas of everything.

For how will weaker policy goals be defended against stronger ones? “It’s a matter of national security, don’t you know…”

Clause 38 of the Digital Economy Bill “solves” this problem by simply ignoring it – those with the highest bureaucratic power will win the fight; we’ve seen this already with the Home Office demanding the names and addresses (p16) of patients – and it’s quite clear they’d have grabbed everything if they’d wanted to.

In this context, with the Digital Strategy of DCMS, and Cabinet Office’s warmed-over Government Transformation Strategy in play, what should happen to make the world they’re trying to build safe?

The greatest concerns must be with the Transformation Strategy; the current “ethics framework” suggested by GDS (the part of Cabinet Office responsible for writing the Strategy) is so flawed, for example, that it suggests a Privacy Impact Assessment can fit on a single sheet of A4 – the self-same strategy used to justify care.data, relying on NHS England’s public statements. Thus far, the country has been saved from a systemic collapse in trust by the fact that this “ethics framework” isn’t actually used by departments.

So what’s the alternative? A citizen view of Government.

Government insists it should be able to copy our data – whatever it wants, wherever and whenever it likes – including to its commercial partners, e.g. Google (or rather, Alphabet) DeepMind and Palantir, for whatever policy whim catches the interest of any particular official. Proportionality and public acceptance are irrelevant; these are not what the civil service is set up to do.

As we saw with DeepMind at the Royal Free Hospital, one person with power can torpedo years of careful and diligent work in order to meet their own short-term, narrow perspective, self-interested goals.

The single Government department makes this worse, if left unaddressed. What should replace it is a citizen view of Government.

This conversation has never been had. The discussions that have been facilitated were designed to get to the pre-conceived end state of the Cabinet Office. As such, the answer was given and civil society time was wasted on a ‘debate’ that was entirely pointless; any wider opportunity to improve the use of data in Government through the Digital Economy Bill was lost.

As an example, well-defined APIs might work for departments – but if departmental silos weaken (as is the explicit goal: “to remove barriers to data sharing”) then things begins to fail. Citizens should not have to rely on how Government talks to itself.

The start of the conversation has to be with complete transparency to citizens – with the likes of Verify and public bodies being accountable to the citizens they work for. Citizens can now be shown what data is required for their transactions, and from where it will be accessed, and why. Operational decisions should inform democratic debates, both by policy makers and citizens who wish to engage in democratic debates about the services that affect them.

Civil servants all work for the Crown and not the public – whatever ‘flavour’ of Government is in power – and this may be a tension that needs consideration. What happens when the political will meets the public won’t? How is trust in institutions maintained?

Because without action, continued secrecy and the drip drip of cockup will undermine all trust.

This works in practice

Fortunately, some NHS GPSoC IT Providers (the data processors who provide IT systems to your GP) have taken the lead in fixing the systems from within the system. How many decades will it take Whitehall to catch up?

We have already demonstrated what this looks like – with Verify and other tools.

Rather than a “single government department”, the principle should be a “Citizen View of Government” – where every service a citizen has touched can be seen, with accountability for how they used data and why. This would make Government accountable to the citizen, as it should be – without the citizen having to understand the intricacies of how Government works.

In a “Citizen View” world, whether Government is one Department or many doesn’t matter as much. If civil servants want to justify access to data, they can – but they must be aware that citizens will be told what data and why, and might become unhappy about it if the reasons aren’t just.

Any Government that fails tell its citizens what it is doing and why, or which doesn’t really want them to know, will not be wanted in return – as the EU discovered with Brexit. This is what the open policy making process should have prepared the groundwork for; the price of that failure keeps going up as digital continues its march.

Unless we wish to treat data about human beings with less care than we treat the data about carcasses in our food supply chain, ‘Globalisation 2.0’ will be based on registers and code – determining risk and eligibility for consumers and for regulators. This simply does not square with a world of copying data; it can only work in a world of APIs to data where there is a lawful, published case for each access, grounded in fundamental accountability to citizens about their data.

It is obvious that data about the food we eat should not be locked in a filing cabinet in Whitehall. It should be equally obvious that “taking back control” shouldn’t mean giving every civil servant a copy of all the data on every citizen.

Related pieces:

• Patients’ Data in the Party Manifestos
• The Home Office: Secretive, Invasive, and Nasty
• What does a Citizen’s view of Government look like?

In various guises, those who coordinate medConfidential have been dealing with the effects of Home Office missteps for what now in total amounts to decades.

Liberty Human Rights Awards 2010

Here is some of what we have learnt:

Home Office is the part of Government that must confront and ‘deal with’ the absolute worst in the world: murder, rape, terrorism, paedophilia – the stuff no-one really wants to have to know about; things from which civilised people prefer to turn their eyes. There are obvious – and legitimate – reasons that some of what the Home Office does must be confidential or classified.

The people who we task with dealing with these terrible issues deserve to work in a culture of compassion and competence, with solid foundations in Justice – the current Home Office has none of these.

Secret: Hiding errors in a file marked Secret harms the public good.

As can happen with bureaucracies more generally, the hint of secrecy at Home Office has spread into an all-encompassing security blanket around any information that might be be helpful to an informed debate in a democracy.

Treating information about every offence and misdemeanour as if they were the worst, keeping arbitrary secrets, and hiding your actions while telling others they must simply trust that “It’s for your own good” are the actions of someone who has lost perspective. Lost a sense of proportion. And lost the ability to discriminate, except in the prejudicial sense.

The examples of this are countless – from Ministers’ refrain of “trust us” about the ID scheme to “We know but we can’t tell you” about the Communications Data Bill; from petty refusals to extreme resistance to simply ignoring requests for information; and as evidenced by the secret ‘National Back Office’ in the NHS, only exposed in 2014, when Sir Nick Partridge reviewed what happened in the building where the previous-but-one Home Office-administered ID card scheme ended up.

Worse than that, on getting information via a backdoor into people’s medical records, the Home Office wrote in secret to people’s doctors, telling them to deny treatment.

Invasive: No consideration of innocence, or the consequences of action

The political culture pervading the Home Office has led to an organisation which cannot consider side-effects.

It sent round “Go home” vans because they might contribute to a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, without any regard to the effects of that hostile environment on innocent parties.

And it’s lost the ability to discriminate: to Home Office, everything it looks at is a crime – or a potential crime – so it is prejudicial towards everyone.

In being unable to discriminate between ‘crimes’ – including thoughtcrime, and perfectly normal behaviour, such as trying to keep your personal communications private – Home Office discriminates wildly and inappropriately against whole classes of people, and individuals who have in fact done nothing (or very little) wrong.

And, in pursuit of its obsessions, it considers nowhere, and nothing, sacred (Q78).

If it will not respect the boundary of the confidential relationship between you and your doctor, where is it that you believe the Home Office will not go?

In this world view, the entire country gets treated the way the Home Office treats illegal immigrants (which it claims is “respectful”!) and – after many attempts, including a RIP Act that for years emboldened nasty, technocratic petty-mindedness down to the local council level – it has finally got its Investigatory Powers Act, so it can snoop on all our communications data.

Nasty: Fear breeds paranoia, and suspicion is contagious

Bullies are fearful. They don’t always appear to be – especially when they get themselves a gang. But you can tell bullies by the way they pick on people, and who they pick on; the weak, the odd, the vulnerable. People who can’t put up a fight.

The Home Office delivers little itself; it cannot act directly in many of the areas for which it is responsible. For these areas of concern, it develops policy, dispenses budgets for various programmes, commissions systems, lobbies for legislation, and other things – but it assumes everything will fail, which leads to suggestions like a 15 foot high concrete wall around Parliament: “Operation Fortress Commons”.

But the few things it can do corrupt everything. It tries to turn everyone it leans on in every part of the public services into a border guard, or a snitch. Demanding the Met hand over details of those who witness crimes makes everyone less safe – if you are the victim of a crime, you want those who know something to share what they know with the police, without fear that it may be used against them. In this case, the hostile environment is hostile against innocent victims of street crime, because the Home Office has harmful priorities.

There are countless examples of each of these, which will appear over the course of the campaign. Some of them will even come from us…

The Home Office has been responsible for a string of high profile, national embarrassments in recent years. Flawed decisions by Home Office led to national humiliation at the opening of Terminal 5 – ever wondered why the baggage handlers couldn’t get to work? The shameful disarray of the G4S contract for the Olympic Games, from which Home Office had to be rescued by the military. The collapse of many criminal trials because policy at SOCA and NCA was simply unlawful. The harm to the UK’s economy, and international reputation, from the wrongful deportation of 48,000 students – because the Home Office panicked after watching a TV programme. And the harm to public safety and public confidence.

Shorn of Justice, the Home Office has lost touch with humanity, proportion, and the fundamentally positive spirit of the Britain. Human Rights are pretty much all that protects you from excesses or mistakes by the Home Office.

How does this relate to the NHS and privacy?

The greatest hazard in this election comes not to/from Brexit, but rather the deeper, more insidious threat to the autonomy of every citizen from the State. It forgets the worldview that created the NHS: that no matter what the world’s darkness, there will always be people there helping.

In a Brexit world, the Home Office worldview offers the NHS just three choices: be nasty to ‘brown people’; be nasty to everyone; or ID cards. These are the only choices its worldview can see, while the perspective of the NHS is quite simple; healthcare, free at the point of use, for all those in need. Without discrimination.

Related pieces:

• Patients’ Data in the Party Manifestos
• On what principles will data be used in the Single Government Department?