Government loses more records

The wonderfully efficient government here has managed to lose even more confidential data on citizens, just weeks after losing sensitive information on some 25 million people (and taking quite some time for Alistair Darling to actually get round to telling citizens and the House) - now they've admitted losing a hard drive with information on some three million candidates for the driving theory test. While not as potentially sensitive as the HMCR balls-up (which included losing data such as children's details, bank accounts and national insurance numbers) it is astonishing that civil service departments can continue to be so bloody incompetent. Sure, mistakes always happen, but repeated mistakes of such magnitude?

If any of us in a private sector job screwed up on that scale repeatedly we'd be fired. Unlike in the civil service or government - the HMCR head Paul Gray who resigned over his department's almighty screw-up was back working in a government post - the Cabinet Office no less - a few weeks after resigning at a salary in excess of £200, 000. That's 200K paid from our taxes, boys and girls, so we work away in jobs where our bosses would fire us for this level of ineptitude (and rightly so) yet folk earning many times more than us (with far better pension and holiday rights as well, plus Honours thrown in regularly) get another extremely well paid job as a reward for mismanaging a major public service. And naturally no politicians are resigning or taking the rap for it, despite the fact their reforms of the civil service contributed in part to the system failing in the first place (and repeatedly). And then our 'leaders' wonder why increasingly we are a nation of people who seem selfish and unwilling to accept personal responsibility when they set these kinds of examples time and again...