The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT), which campaigns for social justice, said ContactPoint was 'almost certainly' illegal under human rights or data protection laws.
Its new report The Database State assessed 46 public-sector databases across Government departments and said 11, including ContactPoint, should be abandoned or redesigned, rating them as red under a traffic light system.
ContactPoint will hold each child's name, address, gender and date of birth and contact details for their educational setting and GP.
It is being piloted in 17 local authorities and by children's charities Barnardo's and KIDS this spring, and is due to be rolled out to the rest of England by the summer (News, 27 January).
Security fears have already prompted several delays to its introduction.
The JRRT report rated ContactPoint as red – 'because of the privacy concerns and the legal issues with maintaining sensitive data with no effective opt-out, and because the security is inadequate (having been designed as an afterthought), and because it provides a mechanism for registering all children that complements the National Identity Register.'
It also rated as red the electronic Common Assessment Framework, which holds an assessment of children's welfare needs.
The report said, 'It can hold sensitive and subjective information and can be widely disseminated.'
Dr Eileen Munro, an expert on child protection from the London School of Economics, told Nursery World that ContactPoint was not 'a solution' to child protection failings.
She said, 'The Government presents it as a child protection measure. I've looked at many child abuse enquiries and it's not about knowing someone's phone number, it's because people don't understand the information they receive is significant and a possible indicator of abuse.'
She said there was 'a fantasy' that ContactPoint could solve child protection failings. 'There is no way it would have made a significant difference in the Victoria Climbie case, for example. The hospital and the social worker spoke on the phone. It's not an absence of information, but absence of understanding the information.'
She claimed that the Government was encouraging schools and other agencies to bypass parents completely and 'speak to each other without contacting the family'.