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Action on Rights for Children
62 Wallwood Road
London
E11 1AZ
9th September 2005
Reference: EN00079651
Dear Ms Dowty
Thank you for your enquiry to our office about the Pan-London Protocol on
Sexually Active Teenagers and I must firstly apologise for the long delay in
getting back to you.
Having looked through the Protocol and the other documentation you sent
through to us it is our opinion that there are areas of concern in this Protocol
which should be addressed and we will be contacting the London Child
Protection Committee to discuss this with them further.
It should be pointed out that we are not against the concept of data sharing
where this is in the best interests of a child or young person and the Data
Protection Act is not a barrier to snaring in such circumstances. However, we also recognise that there should be ways to do this which offer a proportionate response to the risk to individuals and this Protocol seems to go beyond this proportionate response.
In terms of Data Protection, all processing must be fair and lawful. It should
also be adequate, not excessive and relevant. On first impressions therefore, the proposals in this Protocol do not seem to meet these principles where seemingly low-levels of risk (Le. two incidences of a medium risk in the Risk Assessment Matrix) lead to a check with the Metropolitan police. I am not suggesting that the risks identified in this Matrix do not constitute a need to investigate further (I am not qualified to make that assessment) however, I do think that the Protocol is too vague on which professionals would be making these decisions to satisfy me that adequately qualified people would be involved in this process, therefore leading to possible unnecessary referrals.
Another consideration would be how the 'soft' intelligence would be viewed by others and indeed, who would have access to this. For example, this is a
London-only Protocol, were an individual who had been checked as part of
this Protocol to move to the North-West, would the local police forces have
access to information about this check and, if so, would they have sufficient
knowledge of the scheme to correctly interpret it?
These are our initial thoughts on the Protocol and, as you can see, we have
lots of questions to be answered. I thank you once again for bringing this
matter to our attention and I assure you that we will be taking this further with
the LCPC and others involved with the Protocol.
Kind regards, |
