Government accused over new data loss

The Conservatives have slammed the Crown Prosecution Service's loss of DNA details relating to serious offenders as a "catastrophic failure".

Speaking in the Commons on Wednesday, Tory leader David Cameron said that the latest data loss would lead people to conclude "that this incompetent government simply cannot keep them safe".

The CPS was earlier accused of losing data relating to serious offenders in the latest example of poor information security in a government office.

According to the reports, ministers were recently told that a disc containing details of 4,000 offenders, some believed to be murderers and rapists, whom the Dutch authorities wished to trace, had been missing for almost a year.

Initial checks on 2,000 samples carried out by police had found matches against 15 people, including 11 who had committed further crimes in Britain during the past year.

At prime minister's questions Cameron asked Gordon Brown to explain why "for an entire year it did absolutely nothing with that information".

Brown replied that the attorney general had asked the CPS to look at "how this happened" and explained that he understood the offences related to
assault and the non-payment of fines.

However he added that it was "only possible for the Dutch to ask us to look at those DNA records because we are keeping those records".

He pointed out that the "Tories opposed that legislation" and that there were "no records kept of foreign criminals under the Conservatives".

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said the problem had "very grave" implications and would deal "yet another hammer blow" to public confidence in the government's handling of information.

Clegg told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "Of course the responsibility for this lies with the home secretary, but I think there is a more systemic political failure of this government to get to grips with the database culture it has created.

"It has created a database state which it doesn't seem to know how to handle in human terms."

He added: "What we learn from this is that, however much faith and money the government puts into new state-of-the-art databases, if you don't have basic human competence in the way you run these databases, then you will always have these mistakes."

The Conservatives also demanded a government statement into the matter.

Shadow home secretary David Davis said: "I think we should have a statement to explain exactly how this happened... why on earth the previous failures didn't lead to systems being put in place to stop this sort of failure."

The Home Office said: "It would be inappropriate for us to comment on this as it is an ongoing police investigation."