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Who would trust Labour on ID card security? London
Telegraph Gordon Brown got it partly right when he faced the Commons yesterday to explain the loss of 25 million child benefit records. He was suitably contrite over the way his Government had, in David Cameron's words, "failed in its first duty - to protect the public". The Prime Minister made no attempt to play down the scale of the fiasco and revealed that he had asked the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, to lead a review of the way every Whitehall department handles sensitive data. It is a pity the Prime Minister then felt the need to indulge in partisan politicking by quoting dusty Tory proposals to cut even more jobs at HM Revenue and Customs. He misjudged the mood of both the House and the country.
Away from the Commons knockabout, what remains most worrying is the Government's refusal to accept that this blunder should sound the knell for ill-begotten plans for compulsory ID cards. Ministers cleave to the view that, because the cards will carry the holder's biometric details, they will be foolproof. That misses the point. It is the database storing the personal information, not the card, that is the problem. The child benefit debacle shows that the Government has neither the systems nor the personnel to guarantee its security. When a junior employee has access to the entire child benefit database, authorised or not, there is something badly awry. It raises disturbing questions about the standards and professionalism of a civil service that was once the envy of the world. For this was not a one-off. The catalogue of security lapses at HMRC is hair-raising. In the past year, there have been 2,111 reported breaches of security, including the theft of 41 laptops.
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