We call on Peter Kyle to guard the information gateway 

Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, is steering the Data Bill through Parliament. It will establish an information gateway and a digital identity system, which look set to allow gender self-identification in place of sex. 

This week Sex Matters, together with Lord Arbuthnot, one of the heroes of the Post Office scandal, went to meet the Secretary of State. We told him that unless he fixes this problem with the information gateway, he is setting up the UK government for another costly and damaging IT project failure.

Even as the legal definition of sex is becoming clearer, the government looks set to sleepwalk into setting up a nationwide system of digital gender self-ID. 

The government’s Data Bill will establish an information gateway that will enable public authorities to share people’s personal information so they can prove facts about themselves via digital identity services, for instance when applying for jobs or admission to schools, registering for services, and in pubs and clubs.

Personal data that comes from the information gateway will be endorsed by the government to be of the highest standard of trustworthiness. 

But as the Sullivan Review has exposed, the public bodies that hold our information have not kept it accurate or labelled it properly. Instead they have mixed up sex with the idea of gender identity. 

Unless Kyle makes the information gateway secure, he is going to make it impossible to record and share accurate, dependable information on individuals’ sex in any public or private institution. 

This will cause practical difficulties when, for instance, ensuring that people who identify as transgender get the right healthcare and excluding men who identify as women from women’s sports and female-only services. 

It will make it impossible for schools to know whether the children applying for admission are really boys or girls, and it will provide a government stamp of veracity to men posing as women on dating sites and online forums, and as providers of health and social care. 

The Data Bill will be coming back to the House of Commons for more debate after Easter. 

We asked the Secretary of State, who holds the keys to the information gateway, to commit to stopping bad data coming through. 

If you have two minutes today, send our email to Peter Kyle to make sure he realises how serious and important a problem this is.