This failure won’t obscure the government’s failure for long

The failure of Steve McClaren’s England team last night has knocked the HMRC debacle off some off the front pages but it is certain that this story will be back. First, blaming some idiot junior member of staff—as Brown and Darling have been doing—just won’t cut it as a senior manager appears to have known that the full set of data was to be sent to the National Audit Office. Second, there has been a pattern of carelessness with people’s personal information at HMRC that the press are now turning their attention to. The Times reports this morning,

The HMRC has a history of losing sensitive information on unencrypted CDs. This month it emerged that it had lost confidential data on more than 15,000 people after a CD-ROM was lost in transit as it was sent from its office to the Standard Life pensions department in Edinburgh. A further CD-Rom containing data on customers of an unnamed second company was also reportedly missing.