The Wardman Wire

Dave Cole made some excellent comments on the affair (I haven’t yet decided whether to call it a -gate, an imbroglio, a disaster or a simple mistake with huge consequences). A good antidote to the party politics, and a reminder that there are two sides to this, the political and the organisational.

Dave comments:

Firstly and in practical terms, I should think that every governmental organisation is currently sending a very pointed letter to every employee about its data protection policy.

And takes a little pop at my post yesterday (which you will have to read over there).

My second point is about resignations. Ministers are responsible for things that are not practicably under their control. They do bear ultimate responsibility for their departments, but HMRC is a non-ministerial department. Ministers are and should be accountable, but I don’t think there is understanding of exactly what the relationship, whereby policy but not implementation (I think) is set by ministers, is. Equally, I don’t think that calling for heads to roll is a good idea.

I think that the loss of data is largely a symptom of a department of state that has been made to re-organise quicker than is possible without damaging the quality of management of that department. It is a breakdown of systems caused by a loss proper priority for safety and security at a time of change. Or to put it another way:

How do we make sure that short term political priorities do not undermine the reliability and efficiency of the machinery of state that we all depend on?

I’m not sure about resignations, but this key question must not be lost in the political knockabout that is coming,

Thirdly, ID cards are now holed below the waterline. As I understand it, access to a national database for ID cards would have had tougher controls, not least because of the degree of public scrutiny.

Personally, I hope they are. My full comments on Dave’s post are below. It shows where my thinking is in response to the Alistair Darling statement - which I heard after my initial post. I’ll be posting about this in more detail later this morning.

Dave

Lots of good points. And thanks for the link. I’d comment:

1 - In my defence, I wrote my piece at lunchtime, based on various news reports, so well before the speech. I’ll revisit the question this AM.

2 - I agree with you that a large part of the problem for Mr Darling is that he is in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, there are a number of real issues for him about how he managed this crisis, which are serious - such as taking a week (OK 6 days) to even tell the banks that the data was missing.

We all know that the time from getting someones bank data to using it can be much shorter than that. That is a political question.

3 - I think that - although there are political questions involved for this Govt (largely to do with a gung-ho appproach to the risks of large databases and not listening to repeated warnings) - the fundamental problems are deeper than political, and apply to the Conservatives as much as Labour. The questions that need to be addressed are perhaps bigger than any one politician or administration.

4 - The actual practical problem we have seen here is fallout from requirements by politicians (both parties) to change large organisations more quickly than is possible safely. I’d identify repeated NHS, education or Local Gov reform over several decades as exactly parallel problems.

5 - Although there will undoubtedly be letters to employees here, the loss of the disk is the symptom of a cultural problem (not even a procedural problem) due to too rapid change preventing a safety culture developing.

6 - I’d suggest that any large scale change in an organisation with (say) 50,000 employees is a 3-5 (preferably 6-8) year programme. I think in that point I’m probably agreeing with you.

Contrast that with the speed with which the Home Office and the Inland Revenue have been merged.

>That is a hell of thing to which to have to admit.
Agreed.

My thoughts,

Matt

Tags: alistair darling, dave cole, inland revenue, home office, hmrc, child benefit data loss, data security

[tags]alistair darling, dave cole, inland revenue, home office, hmrc, child benefit data loss, data security[/tags]