The ad hoc committee has produced its report on the draft Local Audit Bill. It has suggested that the Cabinet Office should provide a new home for the National Fraud Initiative.
The Cabinet Office appears to be ideologically wedded to data analytics and has persevered with pilots involving data matching to check the electoral register despite mountains of empirical evidence to show that this simply does not work. It keeps on commissioning more pilots. Somebody is making a lot of money about this, yet the consensus appears to be that at the end of the day fewer people will be registered to vote as a result of their 'constititutional changes'. But, hey, this is good for business, or at least for the businesses doing the processing.
This may be bad news for those who believe that people who have done nothing wrong should be able to go about their business without being suspected of fraud on statistical grounds, for the policy of the Cabinet Office is that both data matching and data analytics should be used to 'prevent fraud'. Data matching is usually defined as the cross matching of data sets to identify anomalies which might indicate fraud. Data analytics refers to statistical, computer based processing which indicates possible fraud on an evidence-free basis.
Possibly because the Information Commissioner responded to the consultation on the draft bill and not to the the sub committee's request for evidence, the sub committee has ignored the warnings of the Commissioner on the Code of Practice and the need for clarity about this. This is an opportunity missed.
Another opportunity missed is in the use of misleading Audit Commission statistics, which is best explained by the fact that both of the committee's advisers used to work for or be linked with the Audit Commission.
The committee has asked the government to clarify what it means by certain parts of the draft Bill, including one part which has been criticized by Liberty and others. This is not good enough. The committee should have taken a view on it and should have referred to the human rights aspects of these proposals.
29. The Secretary of State should provide the House with clarification on the wording of clause 84(2), 91(1) and 91(3) and should provide evidence to assure the House that the clause would not allow data to be used beyond the remit of identifying fraud. We recommend that all possible uses of the NFI should be set out on the face of the Bill and that any amendments should be made by primary legislation.
This makes no sense as it is absurd to state that data can ever be used to identify fraud. At best it can identify potential fraud.
It is not clear what use it would be for the Secretary of State to provide clarification on the wording of clause 84(2). This passage is badly written. Does the committee want the wording to be altered, or does the committee merely want the Sec of State to explain to the House what it means? What counts is what goes into the Act. As we have seen, the Act as drafted does not succeed in doing what we were told it would do before.
Here is what the clause in question says:
84 Power to conduct data matching exercises
(1) The Secretary of State may conduct data matching exercises or arrange for
them to be conducted on the Secretary of State's behalf.
(2) A data matching exercise is an exercise involving the comparison of sets of data
to determine how far they match (including the identification of any patterns
and trends).
It is a shame that my evidence was not printed with the committee's report as it is about the only honest account of the NFI it had. Meanwhile the Audit Commission continues to ignore advice from Bob Neill and Brandon Lewis and to malign taxpayers whose situation is perfectly legal.
Ironically, the report bewails the lack of 'like for like' comparisons in terms of comparing authority performance. It ignores the complete lack of 'like for like' data matching to identify people for fraud investigations.
Margaret Hodge can complain about lack of protection for whistle blowers all she likes: I have blown the whistle on the Audit Commission's gross incompetence and she has done nothing at all about it as far as I can see except to exclude my evidence from the published report and produce it with a set of lower status 'additional evidence'.
