The Home Office has been branded "an utter disgrace" after details of every prisoner in England and Wales were lost. A USB stick with data on all 84,000 prisoners was lost by PA Consulting, a private company which has a contract with the Home Office.Privacy campaigners, opposition parties and the Information Commissioner's Office have rounded on the government. "The question is not why was this data lost - it was lost because they had it - but why anyone got hold of individually identifiable mass data from the supposedly secure Police National Computer at all," said Phil Booth, NO2ID's national coordinator. "No more excuses, no more buck-passing. When is this going to stop?" Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said: "One of the possible consequences is that they [criminals] will bring legal actions against the government and the taxpayer will then have to pay damages to people, who appear to be pretty undeserving, because of the government's incompetence." Concerns were raised by the fact the company which lost the disk is the same firm charged with executing the government's ID cards scheme. "The public will be alarmed that the government is happy to entrust their ВЈ20 billion ID card project to the firm involved in this fiasco, at a cost of millions of pounds to the UK taxpayer," Mr Grieves added. David Smith, deputy commissioner in the Information Commissioner's Office, said the loss showed the "toxic liability" of information loss. "It is deeply worrying that after a number of major data losses and the publication of two government reports on high profile breaches of the Data Protection Act, more personal information has been reported lost," he said. The office is expecting to receive a copy of the report into the incident. "We will then decide what further action may be appropriate. Searching questions must be answered about what safeguards were in place to protect this information," he continued. PA Consulting is desperately searching for the memory stick, with workers checking its premises and checking CCTV footage for clues. Details of serving prisoners include their names, address, date of birth and dates of release, but there are unverified reports that informants' details may have been contained on the sticks, opening up a whole new world of security concerns. The full timeline of the loss is still unclear, but it is understood the Home Office was notified on Monday by the PA Consulting about the loss, with a further confirmation on Tuesday. But there are still no explanation for how the stick was lost. The transfer of data between the Home Office and PA Consulting has been suspended while an investigation takes place. It is the latest in a strong of government blunders which have played into the hands of privacy campaigners who point at the incidents as proof the government is incapable of running its proposed ID cards scheme. As Mr Grieve said earlier today, the Home Office "has a habit of doing this". A Home Office spokesperson said: "We have been made aware of a security breach at the offices of an external contractor involving the loss of personal information about offenders in England and Wales. "A full investigation is being conducted."
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