DATA DAY DÉBÂCLES

It’s been a bad few days for outsourcing. Today the Police Federation has denounced the neighbourhood wardens scheme as “half-baked”, a pretty devastating dismissal. This scheme empowers selected members of the public – there are now over 1,400 of them in England and Wales – to carry out certain low-level law enforcement duties, including the imposition of on-the-spot fines. The wardens are identified only by a lapel badge that describes them as Community Safety Scheme Accredited. They are not recruited by, not trained by, not financed by and not answerable to the police.

Did you know there were such people in our midst? Neither did I. Have you ever seen one of these badges? Nor have I. Would you take orders from or hand over money to somebody in the street who claimed to have special powers, just because they had an enamel badge on their tit? Neither would I.

On Tuesday, it emerged that an IT manager in Oxford had bought on eBay a computer that he found contained account and personal details of several million customers (probably including you and me) of American Express, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the NatWest. The computer had been part of the equipment of an archiving firm that stored the information on behalf of the banks.

Did you know that your bank franchises your personal details to other companies for supposed safekeeping? Neither did I. Have you ever been told this by your bank? Nor have I. Would you agree to your details being outsourced were the bank ever to have the courtesy to ask you? Neither would I.

Last Thursday, we learned that a computer memory stick holding personal data on every prisoner in Wales and England – some 84,000 convicts – and a further 10,000 or so prolific offenders presumably still at large has been mislaid by a private consultancy working for the Home Office. I do not have a prison record – I do not even offend very prolifically – so I am not plagued by easily-answered questions about this matter.

But the common factor here is that these questionable practices are being committed not by a public body, a national institution or government department or by a representative thereof but by a private enterprise or an untrained individual paid out of public funds. This is the fruit of the lamentable post-Friedmanite dependence successive Labour governments have flourished for what they have called Public Private Partnerships, a wretched betrayal of Labour’s historic commitment to public ownership. Those few of us left who still do not believe that capitalism is the answer to every one of the world’s problems have watched this slide into liberal economics with growing gloom.

Of course all organisations of whatever stripe are operated by human beings. And human beings, whatever their particular politics or loyalty or training or Weltanschauung, are fallible, vulnerable, corruptible. But we take it as a given that national bodies, ‘official’ concerns, public utilities and traditional companies (even banks) are visible, answerable and largely dependable. They suggest a philosophy of WYSIWYG, as the computer people put it. So when, for instance, it transpires that your local water company is actually part of a French conglomerate, you feel obscurely let down. When what used to be a perfectly dull but unobjectionable local independent restaurant changes over to buying in all its meals pre-packed and portion-controlled – so that the only skill required of the restaurant is to put it in and take it out of the microwave and bring it to the table without falling over – you retire hurt from going out to eat.

It’s hard to understand how it can be more cost-effective for the prison service to contract out computing tasks, especially when the security undertakings that the contractor would have been required to give turn out to be worthless. It’s hard to understand why the education service pays an incompetent American outfit millions of dollars to screw up royally the marking of the annual examination papers, a task performed perfectly adequately by the education service itself for generations. It’s a mystery to me why the phrase ‘in-house’ has become deemed excess baggage to every public enterprise from the BBC to the NHS.

But if you think that these crass instances of cavalier incompetence with confidential data on the part of unqualified free market cowboys are going to end any time soon or lead to a reverse of the mania to outsource, well … don’t hold your breath.