Ministry of Justice admits losing info on 45,000 people

Nine separate data loss incidents

19 August 2008 10:41 GMT / By Katie Scott

The Government may be making plans to create a huge database of all of our internet and phone activities, but a report from The Ministry of Justice is sure to encourage more dissenters.

The Ministry of Justice has admitted to nine separate data loss scandals, affecting an astonishing 45,000 people in the UK.

The worse of the incidents happened in June 2007 when an unsecured storage device went missing containing details for 27,000 people working for department suppliers.

According to later reports, the details included names, addresses and bank details.

But the Ministry did not inform the people affected after carrying out a series of risk assessments.

Next up - in this catelogue of calamities - in January 2008, a laptop was stolen from government premises containing details for 14,000 people.

These included names, dates of birth and even some national insurance numbers.

The other incidents involved either paperwork getting into the public realm or laptops with sensitive information on them.

The scandals have been detailed in the Ministry's latest resource accounts.

Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman David Howarth MP responded to the Telegraph: "Yet again the Government has shown that it cannot be trusted with citizens' personal data".

"How can ministers possibly argue for the introduction of a universal ID card scheme when they can't even keep safe the data they already have?"