WRITTEN ON November 20th, 2007 BY Ruth Kennedy AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Identity, Transformational Government, What do we want?

Today’s news is full of the enormous security breach at HMRC, from which the personal details of “virtually every child in the UK” have been lost. Of course it’s not just children – those of us adults who have signed up to have the payments made directly into parental bank accounts have also potentially had our privacy and security breached.

The BBC reports

In an emergency statement to MPs [The Chancellor] Mr Darling apologised for what he described as an “extremely serious failure on the part of HMRC to protect sensitive personal data entrusted to it in breach of its own guidelines”. MPs gasped as Mr Darling told them: “The missing information contains details of all Child Benefit recipients: records for 25 million individuals and 7.25 million families.
“The chancellor blamed mistakes by junior officials at HMRC, who he said ignored security procedures. “Two password protected discs containing a full copy of HMRC’s entire data in relation to the payment of child benefit was sent to the NAO, by HMRC’s internal post system operated by the courier TNT. The package was not recorded or registered. It appears the data has failed to reach the addressee in the NAO.”

Weirdly, the Chancellor said that

the missing data in itself was not enough for people to access people’s bank accounts

err, hang on, wasn’t the missing data

children’s names, addresses, dates of birth, NI numbers and where relevant bank and building society account details.

??.

You have to hand it to Paul Gray, the fabulous, highly customer-orientated Chair of the department, for falling on his sword so swiftly and with such integrity. But it’s a tragedy that Whitehall has lost one of its best ‘transformational’ leaders, taking the rap for poor (nay, illegal) decisions made much lower down his tree. Isn’t there a senior manager closer to the breach who ought to be going instead?

Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne asked whether this was a “final blow” to the ID card scheme, saying the government “simply cannot be trusted with people’s information”, pointing out that the government had compromised the security and safety of “every family in the land”.

“Let us be clear about the scale of this catastrophic mistake – the names, the addresses and the dates of birth of every child in the country are sitting on two computer discs that are apparently lost in the post, and the bank account details and National Insurance numbers of ten million parents, guardians and carers have gone missing. “Half the country will be very anxious about the safety of their family and the security and the whole country will be wondering how on earth the government allowed this to happen.”

“They simply can not be trusted with people’s personal information,” added Mr Osborne.

It’s worth noting that HMRC (and the nation’s families) have suffered a social/behavioural failure – not a technological one. But it serves to emphasise once again that there’s insufficient energy and investment made in understanding the social side of the use of technology in public service delivery.

I am trying to think of a wibbi. It’s probably something like: WIBBI if government began to listen really really carefully and urgently to the arguments rehearsed so clearly on these pages (like those of Jerry Fishenden, Kim Cameron, Robin Wilton, Dave Birch, and all the rest of you who know you should be in the list) that much, MUCH greater care is needed when handling large databases of people’s personal information.