A study commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform trust has lobbed a legal hand grenade into the government’s stated ambition to look after us better with the help of bigger and more joined up computer databases. According to the report, the Database State, nearly a quarter of the government’s biggest IT systems – including the national identity register and the Contactpoint index of children in England – are ‘almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law’.

In the week that Google posted views of Britain streets on the web and as the government prepares to place contracts for identity cards, the report taps in to a mood of growing concern about privacy in the electronic age. The study warns that the UK public sector ‘is starting to rely on systems that will have to be changed drastically once a litigant takes a case to Europe’. It recommends that litigants who bring an ECHR case to fight these systems should be shielded from costs orders.

The systems criticised in the report cut across government, but the department with responsibility for data sharing is the Ministry of Justice, which said in a statement: ‘This report presents no substantive evidence on which it bases its assessments of "privacy impact".’

That may be true – but substantive evidence is lacking on the other side, as well.