Darling admits 25m records lost
The BBC reports:
Alistair Darling has blamed mistakes by junior officials at HM Revenue and Customs after details of 25 million child benefit recipients were lost.
The Chancellor said information, including bank details of 7m families, had been sent on discs to the National Audit office by unrecorded delivery.
The discs had never arrived at their destination, Mr Darling told MPs.
He apologised for what he said was “an extremely serious failure” but insisted people were not at risk from ID fraud.
The records include parents’ and children’s names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit and national insurance numbers and in some cases, bank or building society details.
In his reply in parliament, the Shadow chancellor makes the link to the security of the proposed National Identity Register:
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne said the government needed to “get a grip” and deliver a basic level of competence.
He said it was the “final blow for the ambitions of this government to create a national ID database” as “they simply can not be trusted with people’s personal information”.
November 20th, 2007 at 16:53
[...] g admits 25m records lost Posted in Uncategorized by on the November 20th, 2007 Travis Swicegood wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerpt The BBC report [...]
November 20th, 2007 at 17:44
[...] admits 25m records lost
Posted in Uncategorized by on the November 20th, 2007
ID in the News wrote an interesting post today on Darling admi [...]
November 20th, 2007 at 18:11
[...] s so much tosh, the biometric info is just another record in the database. Update 3: No2ID now has this story
You are welcome to comment on this post » (Commentlink)
[...]
November 20th, 2007 at 18:39
Darling was still trying to spin that ID cards will be secure.
How long before he goes?
November 20th, 2007 at 19:29
Each disc has it’s own password so let me guess…
Andy + Pandy
Bill + Ben
Safe + Sound
Micro + Soft
Fire + Wall
November 20th, 2007 at 19:42
So, the Minister concerned is already blaming someone else for this problem. Typical Nu Labour tactic – it’s everybody else’s fault but mine! I can take it then that the Minister responsible will not be resigning? Funny, I thought not! Shouldn’t be surprised, integrity is not part of this Government’s vocabulary. How about spin, lies and deceit?
November 22nd, 2007 at 09:09
In 2001 my bank changed my PIN by mistake, when I couldn’t access my account, was informed that I was probably a fraud victim, and that computers were down so no way of checking. With no number for the bank it took about 10 phone calls to clear the problem up. What didn’t help was that I’d just had a loan of £10k put into the account. A ‘computer error’
In 2006, I didn’t get any gas bills – the gas company started sending my bills to the wrong address. By the time they got my address right they wanted to take me to court for non-payment. It took 10 phone calls over 1 year, being told it would be fixed each time, with an average of 20 minutes on hold, and writing to the CEO to sort. I changed my supplier, the gas company tried to block the transfer. A ‘Database error’.
In 2005 I had a new water meter. I started receiving estimated bills for over £1000 for a 1 bed flat. Apparently the meter used to live in a large building. On one occasion I spent an hour on hold to the water company to try to sort this out.
Computers and people make mistakes. What makes the database state scary to me is how these mistakes cannot be corrected in a reasonable time by anyone with any brains. Kafkaesque nightmare is a phrase that springs to mind.