Government departments really are just haemorrhaging data about us, the people, who give them this personal information because they require that we give it to them. First the HMRC lost the personal financial details of 25 million people. Then we find out that they have also lost six other discs with our data on it. Then it came out that the details of 3 million learner drivers has been lost. And now the NHS is at it:

Nine NHS trusts in England have admitted losing patient records in a fresh case of wholesale data loss by government services, it has emerged.
Hundreds of thousands of adults and children are thought to be affected by the breaches, which emerged as part of a government-wide data security review…
[O]ne of the breaches was thought to involve the loss of names and addresses of 160,000 children by City and Hackney Primary Care Trust, after a disc failed to arrive at an east London hospital. (BBC)

So posting discs certainly isn’t a one-off or even rare occurrence in the public services, but apparently standard practice!

Even though none of this is directly the fault of ministers of the government, they are responsible for it nonetheless. They have consistently failed over the last decade to ensure that our data is dealt with in the proper confidential manner. And these are the people who want us to give them all of our details, to be collated in one place as part of an ID card scheme! No bloody way.

What these stories show is that it is not possible for the State to be trusted with any more of our data than absolutely necessary - and that this data should be spread out with as little as possible in one place.

And there’s one more point to consider - all of these stories have only “emerged” as a result of the investigation after the original massive loss by HMRC. Would they have bothered to tell us about any of these had that not come to light itself?! I very very much doubt it.