If you had been paying attention to the news recently you would have heard all the requests for a central database for this information. Lots of child abuse cases get missed because the records of medical treatment for injuries and case information held by social services are not linked. If this information was stored centrally than a social services case officer would have access to all the facts and be better equipped judge how much the child is at risk.

However the government in this country has earned itself a reputation for cocking up IT projects.

Be very careful for what you wish for. Typically a database that size is develop from a design team. In the design team will be people that will have more knowledge than others and these people could exploit the system if given a reason to do so. By having specialized data in distributed systems the chances of someone getting all the data is very remote provided the same safeguards McAfee mention are used on EVERY database. Lets face that is not the case. Governments typically go with the lowest bidder on projects, an the mandatorys are skewed to the success of the project not necessarily security. Education is key to the key users of the information. If this is done right then nothing needs to be spent on a entirely new database, security on it, application interfaces, etc. Education is expensive, but in the long run it is the one thing that pays back.

How about politicians go first? Let's have them put all of their personal details, medical records, etc. onto a single database that is accessible to all government departments to prove that it's safe.

I'm sure they'd be happy to lead by example.

we should compile all the data available on everyone into one, giant database then have the different departments, agencies etc connect to it through a 256 bit encryption for maximum child security!

There's nothing quite like the centralization of (information =) power.