ContactPoint
former government database in England
ContactPoint was a government database in England that provided a way for those working with children and young people to find out who else is working with the same child or young person, making it easier to deliver more coordinated support. It was created in response to the abuse and death of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié in 2000 in England. Various agencies involved in her care had failed to prevent her death, in particular by individually never realising other agencies had been in contact with Victoria.
ContactPoint aimed to improve child protection by improving the way information about children was shared between services. It was designed by Capgemini and previously had the working titles of Information Sharing Index (or IS Index or ISI) and the Children's Index. The database, created under the Children Act 2004, cost £224m to set up and £41m a year to run. It operated in 150 local authorities, and was accessible to at least 330,000 users.
The database was heavily criticised by a wide range of groups, mainly for privacy, security and child protection reasons. On 12 May 2010 the new UK Coalition Government announced plans to scrap ContactPoint and on 6 August 2010 the database was shut down. From that date the Children Act 2004 Information Database (England) Regulations 2007, as amended in 2010, no longer applies.
“ContactPoint” enters the record as former government database in England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ContactPoint, former and government can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“ContactPoint” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, ContactPoint, former and government provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5164778. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2004, 2010 and 2007.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “ContactPoint”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow ContactPoint primary sources, ContactPoint archive and ContactPoint research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “ContactPoint” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.