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Black Tuesday

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Gordon Brown's premiership has produced nothing but errors, evasions and excuses.

This is incompetence on an imperial scale. If we were perturbed last month by the Home Office’s huge underestimate of the number of foreign workers entering Britain, we should be enraged by HMRC’s culpable negligence for losing half the nation’s personal data. The disks contain data relating to child benefit recipients, which in many cases means the least advantaged whom Gordon Brown’s government expressly promised to support and protect. Yet these vulnerable families are now exposed to a risk that their bank accounts will be emptied and their identities misused. And who should we blame, where should we direct our anger?

An unnamed ‘junior civil servant’ committed the fatal act with a brown envelope; his or her ultimate civil-service boss, HMRC chairman Paul Gray, resigned on Tuesday — a little over a year after the departure of his predecessor, Sir David Varney, who quit after revelations of billion-pound losses through fraud and error in the tax credits system. The accident-prone Chancellor Alastair Darling offered the House of Commons lame promises to do better in future. If the calls for Darling to go too were surprisingly half-hearted, it was perhaps only because few commentators or opposition politicians believe there is anyone more competent on the government front bench who might take over his job.

Likewise in the matter of the Treasury’s handling of the Northern Rock crisis, which was suddenly overshadowed by its mishandling of the lost data. It was not, in any direct sense, the Treasury’s fault that Northern Rock was destined for trouble in the first place — still less was it the Chancellor’s personal doing. A risky management strategy at Northern Rock happened to collide with a seizing-up of global credit markets driven by troubles in the US sub-prime mortgage market. But from the moment that collision course was set in midsummer, every action of the government in relation to it has carried the hallmark of basic incompetence.

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Gervas Douglas

November 22nd, 2007 5:26pm

It is quite extraordinary that a junior civil servant could download such large volumes of sensitive data and then copy it all to a removable medium like a CD. This demonstrates major negligence with respect to the specification and design of the security features of HMRC's computer systems. The minister responsible at the time - our current Prime Minister.