Figures released yesterday by the Information Commissioner’s Office show that there have been 176 data breaches in the public sector in the past year.

Data breaches in the private sector were less than half this number: 80 cases were reported.

Earlier this year, Parliament decided that the ICO would be given greater powers to penalise organisations which “recklessly” lose personal data. Information Commissioner Richard Thomas is calling for this to take place as soon as possible.

www.publicservice.co.uk has the story.

Ken Macdonald, the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, has launched a wide-ranging attack on the encroachments on our civil liberties. Coming from someone at the coalface of trying to secure prosecutions, Ken Macdonald’s warnings are a particular damning criticism of Labour’s arguments that they are all necessary in order to catch and convict criminals:

He said, the Government should insist that “our rights are priceless” and that: “The best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.”

The intervention will be seen as a significant setback to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith who last week saw her plans to lock up terror suspects for 42 days before being charged thrown out by the House of Lords.

It is also a blow to Miss Smith’s plans for a super-database to record the details of millions of people’s online presence, including emails, SMS messages and Facebook profiles as well as the controversial identity card programme.

Sir Ken chose to issue his tough warning about the perils of the “Big Brother” state in his final speech as DPP, days before he leaves his post at the end of this month.

He warned that MPs should “take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear”. (Telegraph)

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, said:

Sir Ken Macdonald has sounded a clarion call for freedom. He is absolutely right to highlight the danger of a Leviathan state that wants to know all and control all about the citizens it should serve and not master. Even very recent history shows that extraordinary state powers are not just used to pursue terrorists. A brief examination of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act shows that it is far more likely to be used to spy on children, pets and bins than it is to catch serious criminals.

Another day, another large-scale data loss by the Government, this time featuring the Home Office and its contract PA Consulting. A memory stick was loaded up with the following, and then lost:

• Information on around 10,000 prolific offenders
• Information on 30,000 people from the Police National Computer
• Information on all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales

The prolific offenders information (and possibly the others) was also unencrypted.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s view? “Charlie Chaplin could do a better job running the Home Office than this Labour Government.”

Are the police going to get the power to stop and question people - on pain of a £5,000 fine - or not?

First there was the leak - the government was to extend powers currently only held in Northern Ireland, for the police to stop and question anyone without the crucial safeguard of reasonable suspicion.

But fortuitously, there’s a Labour deputy leadership election going on and the candidates are trying to out-do each other on sounding, at turns, like a socialist and like a liberal.

So Peter Hain pops up to defend our liberty (and his campaign) and says it’s a bad idea. So did Nick Clegg, by the way, and he’s not even in the running.

Someone at the Home Office then briefed the Guardian that they had “dropped” the plans.

But in his statement to the Commons John Reid said

Consideration [of stop and question] is at a very early stage and is currently subject to a process of internal government consultation and we will report the outcome of that in due course.

Is that “dropped”? Or is that “put on the back burner until we need to sound tough on terror again”?

Incidentally, what’s especially interesting about Hain’s intervention is that the idea of extending stop and question seems to have come from the Northern Ireland office. They are getting rid of its counter-terror laws as part of the devolution deal, but wanted to keep stop and question and thought it would be less controversial if it were a UK-wide power. But just who is the Northern Ireland Secretary…?

Enough with the complaining about the delay in publishing this ID card cost report: time to complain about what it reveals.

Over the next 10 years, ID cards will cost £5.55bn. That’s up from an estimate of £5.4bn six months ago - but they also reveal today that, whoops, they got the numbers wrong in October and at that point the cost was just £4.9bn. So that’s a 13% cost increase, an extra £640m in total, pushing the total cost of an ID card for Joe Citizen to over £100.

And the icing on the cake? The Home Office has been spinning all day that the costs are really only £5.3bn. If you read the full cost report, this is the cost noted in table 3, which is something along the lines of “how much ID cards would have cost last October, if changes we’ve made to the scheme since then had been incorporated”. Also known as “a completely pointless piece of information we’ve included to make things look less bad.”

Hooray for transparent government!

Welcome to the Home Office Watch blog, a single repository of all the shambolic errors and mistakes made by the British Home Office and Ministry of Justice compiled from Parliamentary Questions, news reports, and tip-offs by the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team.