Meet the man who stands between private lives and the right to know

“I would question whether there’s a greater case for convergence between police files and tax files and between bank records and health records,” he said. “There’s a trend towards greater convergence and it can classify people in ways which may be wrong and artificial. But there is also the risk of mistakes. There are risks the information is going to be mishandled.”

The threat is out there, but it’s all a little vague — which, given that Mr Thomas is dealing with theoretical dangers, may be understandable. His worst fear is of all these statesponsored monitoring systems linking up to one electronic Big Brother.

Take the children’s register: within a couple of years the Government aims to record electronically basic details about every child in England, including their address, school and doctor. Any professional who has concerns about a child will be able to add a red flag to their file, so that if others involved are also worried they can get in touch and share information. Is this an essential child-protection measure or a sinister bar-coding of childhood?

“I’m not persuaded that it’s necessary to set up an index of every child in the country where the rationale is to do with ensuring the social, educational, general health, wellbeing and thriving of all children,” he said.

“Now, if there are going to be flags of concern, let’s be precise — what do we mean by a flag of concern? If a child is being abused or there are very strong allegations of abuse, that’s clearly a concern. Is it a concern that the child is not thriving at French GCSE? We have to define this more precisely. And I think it’s part of our job to force those who are bringing forward these schemes to be as clear and open as possible on what they’re doing, why they’re doing it.”

So Mr Thomas tries to police this line between what should be your own affair and what it is necessary for the State to know. His job tugs him in both directions, upholding the Data Protection Act on the one hand, and forcing openness through the Freedom of Information Act on the other.

With the identity card database winging our way, as well as an NHS database that will hold every patient’s medical records, plus the children’s register, the Government seems to be seizing ever-greater control of citizens’ private details. This alarms the Information Commissioner.

“It’s not just unwarranted intrusions into privacy, it’s also the dangers of inaccurate information, of mistakes being made, of information being held too long,” he said. “And I think we’ve got to have some concept of rehabilitation. We have to have some sort of concept that young people do misbehave, young people do engage in antisocial activity. Should that blight their lives almost forever?”

He seemed to be talking about the criminal records database rather than the children’s database; Mr Thomas slipped between the registers so frequently that we could have lost him altogether. The children’s database will not hold any information about criminal records, although it may “flag up” that a child has had contact with the police, which could, of course, be damaging if, say, a school was selecting pupils and checked the database.

Mr Thomas’s concern about French GCSE results is similarly unfounded; the flurry of stories that floated around this summer about the register containing children’s academic records (and details of how much fruit and vegetables they eat) were untrue.

When Mr Thomas began his career, radicalised by going to university in the Vietnam years, he worked for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, taking up the cases of poor immigrants in West London. But he now seems torn between what he calls his “double role”, one the referee, the other the campaigner.

Although there are no shortage of rulings from him — wearing away patiently at the Government’s resistance to releasing controversial information, at MPs refusing to give details of how much taxpayers’ money they spend and at the private sector for failing to safeguard people’s private data — his public warnings are rare and can be more than a little hazy.

The danger of being stigmatised through hidden data-sharing is the subject of a report to an international data protection conference in London next week. We had to press him hard to give examples of how it happens before he detailed the cases that cross his desk. The worst concerned a little girl’s chance remark at school that resulted in her father being refused work because he had been classed as a suspected paedophile.

“A little girl was overhead in the school playground to say, ‘My dad “bonked” me last night’. And the dinner lady heard this and reported it to the school authorities.”

The social services soon established that the girl was referring to her father tapping her playfully on the head with an inflatable hammer. They closed the file but, in the days that had elapsed, details had been passed on to the police — and they were not updated. Five years later the man discovered that he was still registered as a suspected sex offender. “And that, in my view, is wholly unacceptable.”

Mr Thomas was less comprehensible on what can be done to stop this stigmatising: among some long responses that do not quite answer the question, we pick out that he wants a “national debate” on the length of time that records stay active, and jail sentences for leaking confidential records.

His most emphatic answer of our conversation was when we asked if he ever felt paranoid about disclosing his own personal details in daily life. “No!” he said. “Full stop!” But at home in the Surrey stockbroker belt, with his wife of more than 30 years, he carefully disposes of all his sensitive documents. This is a little pointless if, however, you are unfortunate enough to deal with a business that is slapdash with your secrets.

“A number of banks have been very careless with people’s personal information,” he said. “I’ve been horrified by some of the stuff I’ve seen. I’ve seen rubbish bags [opened up] and there you find bank statements; we’ve got one example of a bank transfer of half a million pounds from one account to another. With loan applications which have been turned down, with a health insurance application, with paying-in slips, with cut-up credit cards.

“The bank’s the first to say, ‘Be careful with your personal information, shred everything, burn everything. Don’t leave any fingerprints around because identity theft is a growing problem’. But if the banks themselves are being careless with the information, that seems to me to be wholly unacceptable.”

The Information Commissioner is investigating branches of HSBC, Halifax, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland, as well as a post office. “They may have been concentrating a lot more on electronic security, they may have forgotten about some of the old-fashioned security. They will all say, I’m sure, we have procedures in place to stop this sort of thing happening. But procedures that are not actually operating in practice — there’s something wrong. What we’re seeing so far is highly disturbing and we need to send a very strong wake-up call.”

It is not just banks; they have had complaints about WH Smith, and the Grand Hotel in Brighton – where, for obvious reasons, people may not want their little getaways made public.

“You can imagine some people don’t want others to know that they’ve been staying at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. But when you’ve got copies of bills with details of who went there and when they were there and so on, that’s highly intrusive information.”

At least in the private sector you can take your business elsewhere. You can, like Mr Thomas, buy only from reputable internet sites; and you can choose from an increasing number of companies that sell themselves with the assurance that they will keep your details safe and not sell them on to others.

“I’ve got more concerns about the public sector where you have no choice. At least you can choose to go to Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Safeway, Morrisons or Waitrose,” he said. “In the public sector you’ve got a monopoly, whether it’s police or identity cards or tax or all the other public bodies. You have no choice but to deal with them.”

The public did not choose Mr Thomas as their champion, but does he reassure us? At the end of the interview he says he has not managed to communicate something very important. “Yes?” we ask eagerly, expecting more terrifying revelations, or an inspirational call to arms.

“I have not got across the three points I wanted to make, what drives me. One is empowering citizens; two, demystifying the law; and three, make sure that rights are effective.”

This is the most singularly appropriate thing about the Information Commissioner: he seems to make no distinction between information that is interesting and that which is not.

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