Admitted at last

The Daily Telegraph yesterday carried the story that the Rural Payments Agency, of DEFRA, lost the confidential details of all farmers in England, roughly 100,000 of them. The details contained bank details, addresses and security passwords.

These, on on one CD and 38 back up tapes, were apparently lost in June 2008. The loss was noticed only when IBM carried out a review of the RPA's computer systems in May this year, - almost a year afterwards. Most of the tapes have now been accounted for.

The IT consultants passed the information to DEFRA officials, but it was not passed further to ministers. Hilary Ben, Environmental Secretary, was told only last week, although RPA had (re)discovered the fact from its own internal audit in September.

This is one of a long line of careless loss of confidential information, lost or mislaid, by government departments. In addition RPA have a poor record in their main function, of delay in handing out EU payments to farmers.

In the meantime farmers are concerned that there is still some information on some farmers which has not been traced. For the rest of us, the carelessness will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds in fines and in investigation and administrative costs.

Ministers are in charge of departments, and they should bang together the heads of senior officials, who in turn should make sure that things like this do not happen.