Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

Dear James Purnell,

Where does this end?  We don’t have to wait more than a few weeks to hear of yet another government or government-contracted official carelessly losing the personal details of thousands, if not millions of people.  This time, a memory stick with user names and passwords for a government computer system was found in a pub car park of all places and resulted in a major government website being shut down as a security precaution.  To make matters more terrifying for members of the public, your response had been woeful and makes the prospect of ID cards even more disturbing.

This year alone, we have heard about the details of 600,000 potential Navy recruits being lost, government officials leaving secret documents on trains, a Home Office contractor losing a memory stick containing files on over 80,000 pensioners and the Ministry of Defence losing a disc with the details of 100,000 Armed Services personnel.  This all comes after HMRC lost 25 million child benefit records last year, making Gordon Brown’s statement that “I think the important thing is to prevent these kind of things happening in future” even more insulting.  The latest incident was compounded by the disclosure that you of all people have had to apologise after you left confidential letters relating to the case of a constituent of Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman on a train in early October. Luckily for you, the papers were returned to the DWP three days later by a passenger but when Secretaries of State start playing fast and loose with the intimate personal details of British citizens, you can hardly expect contractors to do any better.

Quite astonishingly, this latest memory stick to go walkabout was found in a pub car park in Cannock, Staffordshire, where Atos Origin – a government contractor – is based. Atos said in a statement that it was clear that an employee had removed the memory stick from the company’s premises in “direct breach” of its procedures and will fully investigate the loss blah blah blah working closely with the police blah blah blah.  Then one of your spokeswomen for DWP said the Gateway website was shut down “for a short period as a precaution” and insisted that the memory stick contained data for “only a handful” of people – so that makes it alright.  It doesn’t matter that next time the memory stick could contain millions of personal records because this time it didn’t, so why panic?  As if the wheres and hows of this incident were embarrassing enough, your response was even more shocking.  You were clearly elbowed out of the way by Gordon Brown on this occasion who noticed how little credibility you now have on this issue thanks to your recent blunder.  However, his fighting talk was hardly reassuring.  In response to leaving the memory stick in a pub car park and risking the security of an entire government website and database, our gloriously magnificent PM said that the DWP would be taking action and Atos Origin could face changes to its five year contract worth £46m.  Wow.  I bet the underwear of every single Atos Origin employee changed colour when they heard that their contract might change.  

There was no mention from you or the PM about curtailments on the use of memory sticks and discs containing sensitive information (which has always struck me as cavalier and arrogant in the face of possible security breaches).  In addition, the topic of ID cards was not discussed.  Unlike some people, I believe that there is a case to be made for some form of ID cards (although nothing like the scale that is being proposed) but you and your fellow Cabinet ministers don’t seem to understand the implications for your ID card scheme when these data losses occur with such regularity.  If each ID card contains 42 pieces of information on every person in the UK, that’s a lot of information to store and a hell of a lot to lose.  You tell us that the database will be safe yet you wonder why nobody believes you.  So much for being the party that ‘listens and learns’.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory