(picture from the Guardian)

This article from Friday’s Register, Beer Fingerprints to go UK-wide, tells us that South Somerset District Council‘s pilot scheme of fingerprinting patrons of local pubs seems to have led to a 48% drop in alcohol related crime between February and September 2006.From the article: ‘Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time – usually a period of months – by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offences are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn [principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council] noted the system had a “psychological effect” on offenders.’

Apparently the Government is so impressed that they’re willing to fund the scheme for ‘councils that want to have their pubs keep a regional black list of known trouble makers’. The Home Office have agreed to fund similar systems in Coventry, Hull and Sheffield, while general funding for the rest of the local authorities is to come from the Department for Communities and Local Government‘s Safer, Stronger Communities budget. The article says that the DCLG is distributing the funds through local area agreements (description sites from the central government side and from local government).

This news article fills me with so many questions I’m not sure where to begin.

• Why is no one else reporting on this activity?? I’ve had a look at South Somerset’s, the DCLG’s and the Home Office’s sites and wasn’t able to find any news on this scheme (though that may be the fault of the search technologies they’re each using. The results I didn’t get, in general, weren’t particularly relevant). I’ve also checked Google news — nothing their either.
• Where is the fingerprint data going? What kinds of Data Protection Act considerations have been made? How easy will it be to find out that your no-good lazy husband was in fact having a pint when he said he’d be at work late? And what about that female fingerprint in the database just before or just after him?
• The previous point of course brings up all kinds of data-sharing questions within the government too. As seen in the Climbié debacle, the Government isn’t fantastic at sharing information when it needs to. Does that help or hurt this scheme?
• How much has business fallen for these pubs? Is all of South Somerset okay with this?

If anyone knows more about what’s going on here, I’d love to be caught up. How bizarre to find this story slid in under the radar.