One of the arguments used in defence of Labour's 'transformational government' strategy of data collection and centralised IT is that there is in effect an inevitability about it.

In other words, that the challenges of security or public service delivery mean that IT has to be used this way and that opposing it is to be on the wrong side of technological progress. One Government report even called for the transformational Government agenda to have been made "irreversible" by 2011.

Yet as Liam Maxwell shows in a new CPS report (It's Ours: Why we, not government, must own our data) there is an alternative to centralised, expensive and very often insecure state databases. Maxwell outlines an approach that puts the individual in control of their data in the sphere of public services, such as health. So for example, rather than the state building a huge database of medical records (a project running over-time, over-budget and having already squeezed out smaller, more innovative alternatives), a better path would be to use services such as HealthVault or Google Health to encourage and enable the individual citizen to use to store and analyse their own health records.

This approach would require all public services to use open data standards to ensure that data can be easily and securely transferred from one data provider to another in the same way that customers can today transfer their accounts from one bank to another.

This concept of 'Vendor Relationship Management' is used not just by the private sector but also by governments in other countries, such as Sweden, in their delivery of public services. The reality is that the UK is behind the curve and remains wedded to an expensive approach (Government spends £16.5 billion a year on IT, with only a 30% success rate) that is being superseded by technological innovation.

The alternative that Maxwell outlines would not just be better value for money, it would draw an important distinction between access to data and control of it, and in terms of the latter, put us as individuals in charge of our own data.