£140,000 of public money has been spent so far  trying to keep reviews of the Government’s plans for ID cards a secret.

The Office of Government Commerce has spent the money on a four-year legal battle to avoid releasing the relevant “Gateway reviews” (stage-by-stage assessments of Government projects) .

The Information Tribunal, which hears appeals against Freedom of Information rulings, ordered ministers last week to publish two reviews into the progress of the ID cards scheme within 28 days.

However, the OGC is not likely to do so readily, and costs could rise even higher, as Computer Weekly reports:

 “Its punctilious arguments for continued secrecy have the full backing of ministers. The OGC has so far:
 -Rejected a freedom of information request for the two gateway reviews to be published
- Rejected an appeal by the FOI applicant to publish the two reviews
- Appealed against a ruling of the Information Commissioner that the reviews be published
- Appealed against a ruling by the Information Tribunal that the reviews be published.

“The OGC instructed Jonathan Swift, one of the two most senior barristers who act for the government in civil law matters, to argue in the High Court for the reviews to be kept secret.

“But the OGC is likely to appeal the Tribunal’s decision, which means it can continue to keep the reviews secret.

“If the OGC were to lose any High Court appeal, it could take the case to the Law Lords. If it lost that too, ministers could veto to stop the reviews being published.

“The two gateway “zero” reviews in question are already more than five years old. They were assessments of the ID cards scheme in June 2003 and January 2004, and gave a view on the feasibility of the ID cards scheme long before the Identity Cards Bill received royal assent in March 2006.”

Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman, said:

“The government is increasingly realising that its ID card scheme is a laminated poll tax with all the same toxic ability to make it unpopular.

“Ministers would win more plaudits if they did not drag their feet on their legal obligations.”  (BBC)

 

You can sign the Liberal Democrats’ petition against ID cards here.

A Home Office spokesperson has admitted that knife crime statistics published in December were not checked by statisticians before being released.

The fact sheet has already been criticised by the UK Statistics Authority for its “selective or otherwise in appropriate comparisons”, “inappropriate conclusions” and “unsubstantiated claims.”

The BBC’s Mark Easton has blogged about the Government’s confused account of how the statistics came to be released:

“This afternoon, cabinet office Minister Kevin Brennan told committee of MPs that “the statistics produced within the Home Office on that fact sheet were approved by statisticians in the Home Office before publication”.

“Startled by a suggestion made by the committee chair… that the stats guys had done no such thing, a flustered Mr Brennan replied: “That is the information I have, but if that is incorrect, Chair, I’ll correct the record”.

“A few hours later and my phone rings. It is a man from the Home Office. Did the statisticians know? “The answer is no”, he replied.

“”They were aware that statistics were being assembled, but saw nothing of the final product”, he told me. “They did not see that fact sheet before it was published.”

“And that wasn’t all he wanted to convey. The press office didn’t sign off the fact sheet either.”

It remains to be seen who was pushing for the release of the fact sheet.

As Sir Michael Scholar, chair of the UK Statistics Authority told the Public Administration Select Committee this week:

“I think if you are going to have trust in official statistics, you can’t have statisticians being leaned upon by politicians, by ministers or advisers or policy civil servants who are working for them.”

Dizzy Thinks highlights the Home Office’s love of flying, when we’re all supposed to be cutting carbon emissions:

“Last year, the Home Office, achieved the staggering figure of 3,115,863 air miles on domestic flights alone. Meanwhile the Home Office did 1,626,114 miles on short-haul and 3,980,766 on long-haul. Apparently this is OK though because the Home Office “ensures the Department offsets carbon dioxide emissions from its official air travel.”

“Frankly this is beside the point. We, the proles, are constantly being told that climate change is going to kill the entire world. That we should avoid unnecessarily wasting energy, certainly not take domestic flights when the trains will do. We’re bombarded with adverts about “Acting on CO2″ and here we have the Home Office doing the equivalent of about 12 round trips from London to Edinburgh every day for a whole year?!?”

..not ours - theirs!

The Home Office’s top civil servant, Permanent Secretary Sir David Normington called in the police after 20 leaks occurred in two years.

Explaining his decision to contact Scotland Yard, he told the Home Affairs Committee that the person leaking Home Office information was “despicable and disloyal.”

The Evening Standard has the story:

“He said he was concerned about the damage the leaks were doing to the operation of the Home Office and about how close to the heart of the Home Office the leaker was. There were also worries about any links between the Home Office leaks and wider leaks of national security information across Whitehall.

“It was the knowledge that the person or people must have had access to the Home Secretary’s office and to her papers that gave us a great deal of concern that national security information was at risk,” he said.”

Unfortunately the Home Office is happy to share “registrable facts about individuals in the UK” because it’s “in the interests of national security“

In the shops, the sales have started early, but did you know that Government departments are being equally generous with desktop and laptop computers?

Why, it’s as though they’re giving them away!

Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show that nearly 3,000 computers have been lost or stolen from Government departments since 2002.

From the Daily Mail:

“In total 1,774 laptop computers and 1,035 desktop computers have been lost or stolen, a rate of nearly five a week and three a week respectively.

This year alone 238 laptops and 40 desktops have gone missing. The past seven years have also seen 676 mobile phones, 202 hard drives and 195 memory sticks lost or stolen.

The worst offender is the Ministry of Defence, which handles some of the most sensitive information in Government. It has had 866 laptops stolen and has lost 178 - more than half the total of missing laptops.”

Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman Paul Holmes whose Parliamentary questions uncovered the figures said,

“Everyone understands that things go astray but it is truly staggering that over the past seven years a laptop has been lost every working day across government.

It demonstrates a culture of carelessness across Whitehall that ministers have done nothing to curtail.

There must be serious concerns about what kind of sensitive data is on the thousands of computers that have gone missing.

This is yet more evidence that the Government cannot be trusted with our personal information.

There is no reason to think they will be any less slapdash with the intrusive ID cards database or the Big Brother phone call log.”

From the Financial Times:

The Home Office on Wednesday terminated its contract with a private company that lost the details of thousands of criminals, in a decision that cast doubt over the company’s continuing advice to government about its identity cards scheme.

Jacqui Smith, home secretary, said on Wednesday PA Consulting would lose a £1.5m three-year deal with the Home Office after an employee mislaid a computer memory stick that contained confidential data on up to 130,000 offenders and prisoners.

Ms Smith said all PA Consultancy’s contracts with the Home Office – worth an estimated £8m per annum – were being reviewed, as well as those signed with other companies…

Tom Brake, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, accused ministers of “making scapegoats out of private companies” to cover up “incompetence at the heart of government”.

A bonus of course. £22 million has been paid out in bonuses to Home Office staff in the last five years according to figures dug up by Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne.

Chris Huhne said, “How on earth can the Home Office justify these huge bonuses given its lamentable performance in recent years? Immigration is in chaos, asylum cases are falling behind again and violent crime has risen sharply.” Quite.

We learn, via the Daily Express, that the Office for Criminal Justice Reform (”Who are they?” we hear you perfectly reasonably cry) has advertised for some media staff. Six, in fact.

We’ll let the Criminal Justice System website (yes, the system has a website) explain about the OCJR:

The Office for Criminal Justice Reform (OCJR) is the cross-departmental team that supports all criminal justice agencies in working together to provide an improved service to the public.

As a cross-departmental organisation, OCJR reports to Ministers in the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Attorney General’s Office.

One might innocently ask why there’s a quango for this, rather than just the Ministry of Justice itself. And why they need six new media staff.

The OCJR also spent £29 million last year on consultancy fees, but we dare not suggest that this might have been anything other than an excellent use of taxpayers’ money.

The Express quotes Liberal Democrat MP Jeremy Browne, to whom we’ll give the last word:

With prisons bursting at the seams, employing armies of new spin doctors is the wrong priority.

Another missing disc case from the Government, this time from our friends at the Home Office.

An IT repair firm in Lancashire was repairing a computer for a customer, who said they bought it on eBay, and discovered an optical disc marked “Home Office” and “Confidential” in the machine. It had been hidden under the keyboard.

The good news, in this case, is that the data on the disc appears to have been encrypted and the disc has been returned. The Home Office has said that the laptop was encrypted too, which suggests it was an official machine but makes us wonder what it was doing on eBay.

The Home Office hasn’t revealed what sort of data was on the disc, but, as The Register wryly suggests, “all the data may have already been lost in other massive governmant data blunders of recent times.”

Ok, we know they’re not very good at things like counting immigrants or keeping track of offenders, but this week brings news of a new failure to count.

The Home Office can’t even work out how many people it’s made redundant. Good news for the department though. The MoD can’t either. Other government departments can mind you, but at least they’ve got a fellow department in the same mess as them this time round.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott had this to say:

“The Home Office and MoD are totally incompetent for failing to give answers, when other big departments can give us these vital figures. No wonder the Home Office loses track of who to deport if it can’t even count its own redundancies,” he said.