AM shocked by twenty five million lost records

12.00.00am GMT Tue 20th Nov 2007

The Welsh Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Social Justice, Peter Black has expressed his shock at the news that personal information for 25 million has been lost by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

The news was broken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons today. He told MPs that discs containing the details of every single Child Benefit recipient, including details of their children, National Insurance Number, date of birth and bank and building society information. The Chairman of HMRC has resigned as a result.

The information was lost after being downloaded to disc and sent to the National Audit Office. The discs were not sent recorded delivery and when it was revealed that the first disc had not arrived, a second disc was sent. The information was password protected, but not encrypted. Some of it should not have been included on the discs.

"There are a huge number of questions that the government must answer on this fiasco," said Mr. Black. "How did a junior official have access to and permission to download the personal information of almost half the United Kingdom? Why were the discs not sent securely? Why was the information not encrypted? The only saving grace here is that it appears the information has not fallen into the wrong hands, but let us be clear, that is only through luck not judgement."

"In my view the government is guilty of twenty-five million counts of breaching the Data Protection Act. Our country has been run by database for many years now. This was a mishap waiting happen. Surely, it sounds the death knell for an ID card scheme and its national database. The government cannot be trusted to handle such a database."