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Creeping culture of disregard for personal data - for The Inverness Courier
THE government's announcement that it had lost the personal details of 7.25 million families, including every child in Britain, provoked gasps of shock from MPs when Alastair Darling told the Commons.
This was a truly astonishing mistake. To lose the personal details, bank account details, and national insurance numbers of nearly half the population is unforgivable.
The government tried to insulate itself from responsibility by blaming a junior official — the only person so far to lose their job without any financial compensation. But having shadowed the two departments responsible for the benefits system for two years now, I believe that the problem runs much deeper.
It seems to me that within both the Department for Work and Pensions and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) there is a culture of carelessness led by senior management and made worse for the ground level staff struggling to do a good job by the substantial job cuts year on year.
Within HMRC, the cavalier disregard for data protection and basic security is bad enough. But anyone who has struggled to deal with the tax credits system will know that errors are rife. With 40 per cent of claims wrongly calculated, that means that two million people received the wrong amount of money.
And the harsh way in which repayment is demanded, with a stubborn unwillingness to admit official or computer mistakes, suggests one rule for the state and another for the rest of us. Too many of these policies are operated in the interests of the state, not the citizen.
The "computer says no" culture is careless of the needs and wishes of the claimant and assumes that everyone else is wrong unless they can prove otherwise.
Nor was this the first such incidents. Several CDs had been lost earlier this year, bringing repeated promises that it would never happen again, all broken. The same pattern can be seen across the benefits system. No wonder that billions of pounds in benefits remain unclaimed. And there is a real danger that these repeated failures to show that personal data will be treated with the utmost care will lead to a loss of confidence in the system, leading people not to claim money to which they are entitled.
The Scottish government has also been caught losing data on CDs, begging the question can any government be trusted to care for our most personal information.
Whatever the answer, it must surely be wrong for such an incompetent government to seek to take even more information. I have long believed the ID card to be wrong in principle. It is a totally unwarranted intrusion, with little proven benefit at a huge cost of over £5 billion. What if the government lost that database?
The ID card scheme should be abandoned now. It is illiberal, unnecessary and very risky. The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman and my preferred candidate for the party leadership, Nick Clegg, has said he would refuse to take the card if it were introduced. He is right — occasionally there are government policies that are so wrong that civil disobedience can be justified. This is one of them.
ENTERPRISE FUNDING
The Scottish government's decision to kick the planned and much-needed expansion of Inverness Airport into the long grass has generated real concern in the city. This is a mistake that could do real economic damage.
Now we learn that Highlands and Islands Enterprise is to have £54 million knocked off its budget over the next three years. This another blow to the Highland economy that has been made in Edinburgh. These Highland cuts are beginning to look like a pattern of behaviour from the SNP government.
HIE has done a good deal for the Highlands over the years; far better than Scottish Enterprise in the rest of the country. It has important work on the agenda, such as supporting the University of the Highlands and Islands.
Despite recent real progress, no one should forget that incomes in our area are far lower than the rest of the UK. We still qualify for EU funding for the continent's poorest regions.
If we are to continue the rapid growth of recent years, the Scottish government needs to show strong support not these disgraceful cuts.
Posted on: 04/12/2007
