Youth Matters: Young people’s civil liberties are eroded

Alongside placing young people as consumers there is also a

strong concern with diverting them from what are seen as
troublesome activities (such as hanging around on the street).
In pursuit of this we have already seen how freedom of
movement and association in public spaces has been curtailed
by the use of curfews and dispersal orders (although
thankfully the government’s authoritarianism in this area has
been dealt a blow by the high court). The emphasis upon the
surveillance and control of young people that characterized
the New Labour Connexions Strategy remains in play in Youth
Matters – the Green Paper for Youth – with all its
implications for the civil rights of young people.

The main area of attack upon young people’s civil rights

in Youth Matters is linked to the proposed introduction of
widespread recording of their participation in different
activities via the proposed youth card and the development of
existing monitoring arrangements. One of the issues here is
that comprehensive data about their leisure time activities and
private lives will become available to the state. However, this
will become an increasingly contested area. There is growing
recognition, as a recent IPPR report put it, of a ‘seeming
imbalance between the Government’s enthusiasm for public
service modernisation and its respect for constitutional due
process’ (Davies 2005: 68). Richard Thomas, the information
commissioner, has warned that proposed the database
containing details of all children and young people (legislated
for within in the Children Act 2004) breaches the European
Convention on Human Rights European Court (Young People
Now March 9, 2005). The comments he made with regard to
identity cards apply with equal force to the youth card and the
databases behind it.

I have expressed my unease that the current proposal to

establish a national identification system is founded on an
extensive central register of personal information controlled
by government and is disproportionate to the stated objectives
behind the introduction of ID cards. It raises substantial data
protection concerns about the extent of the information
recorded about an individual when the ID card is used in their
day to day lives and sparks fears about the potential for wider
use/access to this information in the future. (Thomas in LSE
2005: 3)

The issues of proportionality and of who has access to what

should be key aspects of the debate. The unedifying sight of
youth workers and personal advisers routinely breaching
young people’s civil rights through the entering of information
onto databases capable of linking to wider systems has become
all too common as so called ‘management information
systems’ have come into use within youth services.

As a result of criticisms of this kind, the minister (Beverley

Hughes) has stated that the youth card will not integrate with
the information-sharing plans set out in the Children Act
2004. However, what is left unsaid here is exactly which
databases will they integrate with. They will have to link into
some sort of national infrastructure, and to other databases
within children’s trusts, thus making information available to
different teams – and probably to schools (especially given
that they are the key site for the youth offer).

We need to shift the debate around Youth Matters to look at

young people’s opportunities for privacy. As William Davies
(2005: 32) has written in the context of the expansion and
inter-connectability of government databases and of the
‘digital agenda’ in general, ‘people can only be expected to
embrace technologies actively if they retain the right not to’.
He continues:

In a highly-interconnected society, privacy is the right to

disconnect, to be anonymous and to be alone should one wish.
No consumer would be expected to sign up to a broadband
connection or mobile phone package if there was no way of
cancelling it. And yet, industry and government currently try
to convince citizens of the benefits of technological
modernisation across society, without developing any sincere
narrative as to how we may be able to opt out of it periodically
or permanently, collectively or individually. For people to
engage confidently with an interconnected world, they need
both the entitlement and the know-how to limit that
engagement when they see fit. A genuinely reassuring policy
programme could consist of nothing less.

The Youth Card and the current, routine, monitoring of

involvement with young people via databases intrude in
unacceptable ways into what should be the private lives of
young people.