This week's major privacy headline comes to us courtesy of the Littlehampton Gazette. Now there's a sentence you don't see very often.
There have been two articles recently in the Gazette, reporting on the local (Arun) Council's determined stand against some of the more objectionable aspects of the Audit Commission's National Fraud Initiative. You may remember that I observed, nearly two years ago, that their policy achieved the remarkable double of being both discriminatory and a 'fishing' exercise: they insist on being sent the banking details of all local authority employees (while not imposing the same requirement on other public sector groups such as services personnel, central government civil servants, and so on).
Arun Council apparently got the details straight from the horse's mouth, when the director of the NFI, Peter Yetzes, explained to them that the measure was justified because "everyone has the potential to commit fraud". The head of Arun's audit committee, councillor Barbara Oakley, described this as "an insult to the decent, hard working staff in the fire service, local government and the NHS who are all now regarded by him as potential fraudsters".
Gordon Brown has been wondering, lately, how to 'celebrate Britishness'. How about re-instating the presumption of innocence?
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