In an information age, trust in the confidentiality of the data held by public authorities becomes a central aspect of reliable and responsible government. This obvious fact has just been dramatised for citizens of the United Kingdom by the revelation that two disks containing the complete child benefit database for 25 million people and 7.25 million families have been lost in the post. This State's Data Protection Commissioner warned yesterday that something similar could easily happen here.
The incident will rightly shake confidence in the British government's competence to administer such confidential information in trustworthy fashion - not to mention its ambitious plans for national identity cards and a radical new scheme for internal and external security against cross-border crime and terrorism. Yesterday prime minister Gordon Brown apologised up front for what happened and promised a detailed inquiry. It is a political disaster for his government, coming so soon after his successor as chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling announced that not all the huge £24 billion of public money used to prop up the Northern Rock bank can be recovered.
Mr Brown's own involvement in amalgamating the customs and revenue service with the Treasury while he was chancellor, with scant attention to the loss of reliable control procedures, is also highlighted. These disks were downloaded by a junior clerical officer for transfer to another department and were neither encrypted nor registered nor recorded through the post. It is no way to run an electronic data system, leaving millions of people potentially open to fraud, blackmail and identity theft if the disks are not found.
The Labour government has made several proposals recently for radically enhanced measures against international terrorism. Plans for security barriers, increased police checks on buildings and public events require trust from ordinary citizens that the threat is real and the measures taken proportionate and reliable. This is all the more the case in light of plans to develop a national identity card system at a cost of £10 billion over the next decade and an associated electronic border control regime requiring travellers to divulge 50 pieces of information about themselves to police.
Such plans will deservedly be re-examined in the light of this debacle. That should include all the implications of proposals to integrate the Irish and UK border control systems, which have not yet been fully revealed by either government. It is high time we heard more about them - and they should now be more sceptically received.