09/10/2025
Keep sharing
Raise awareness
Aid understanding
Acknowledge concerns
Advocate for change
Data sharing and linkage is about social justice. The Children’s Bill powers will hurt not help.
The Bill introduces information sharing without consent and using children’s NHS numbers to link their records across government.
Due to worrying lack of detail we cannot know exactly how this government, or the next, will apply these powers. However, we do know that far from change this is more of the same. Please join us in speaking up against this and sign the petition Change.org/No2ChildID
Instead of fixing the issues that children and families face - inequality, poverty, a ‘cost of living crisis’ and a public sector long stripped bare through ongoing austerity - the information sharing approach is one of surveillance and targeting individuals to ‘better’ manage difficulties they shouldn’t have to experience.
The cost of needing any help or public services increasingly means a loss of privacy and of choice. While sometimes the help and support is valuable and wanted, it isn’t always. Too often interventions can be victim blaming, investigative, intrusive and damaging. Evidence shows lifelong negative impacts with those already marginalised experiencing the heaviest impacts.
Children and families should have the right to consent, or not, to their information being shared unless there are concerns about safety and it is deemed necessary to do so. This is because there are costs and dangers to information sharing and because the right to privacy is a fundamental human right which protects children as well as parents.
We know too that children and families - and especially teenagers - care about confidentiality. That concern over the lack of it prevents them accessing services or getting help. This includes those who are Black, racialised, Muslim, Gypsy and Travellers, Roma, those who have special educational needs and disabilities, migrants and those living in poverty.
Increasingly councils and government use dangerous forms of AI systems to identify and target people. Ignoring the overwhelming evidence they don’t work. And AI systems require vast amounts of data as well as consistent identifiers to link these records.
We all lose from the use of these systems and from the widespread sharing of information. Not only because of data security risks and loss of privacy but because they compound inequality, erode democracy, view struggles and non-conformity as risk.
They make US the problem to be focused on rather than failures of government and a broken system.
