Cabinet ‘can’t shirk’ police data blunder
POLITICS: A Labour MP has accused the Cabinet of a “corrosive” culture of not taking responsibility following the accidental deletion of hundreds of thousands of police records.
Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said Government Ministers frequently “just don’t take responsibility” for their errors.
A LABOUR MP has accused the Cabinet of a “corrosive” culture of not taking responsibility following the accidental deletion of hundreds of thousands of police records.
Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said Government Ministers frequently “just don’t take responsibility” for their errors and urged them to be more accountable for issues that occur surrounding their departments.
It follows the loss of a significant number of fingerprint, DNA and arrest history records from the Police National Computer (PNC), which Policing Minister Kit Malthouse said was down to “human error” and “defective code”.
Mr Malthouse said the blunder happened during routine maintenance of the Police National Computer (PNC) last week and that officers are working “at pace” to recover the data. He added that the incident is not thought to have put public safety at risk, according to an initial assessment.
In a statement issued at the weekend, Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “Home Office engineers continue to work to restore data lost as a result of human error during a routine housekeeping process earlier this week.”
Initially, some 150,000 records were said to have been lost, but it has emerged the number is far higher than first thought at about 400,000.
Questioned on the matter at the Fabian Society conference, Mr Thomas-Symonds refused to say whether the Home Secretary should resign, but called for more responsibility to be shown from all Ministers.
He said: “A Cabinet Minister who actually took responsibility for their own department would be a novelty in this government, I am sad to say.
“There was a time when Ministers
did take responsibility and, of course, I would take responsibility as the home secretary for what happens in the department and my responsibility to put it right.”
He added: “Far from having a Home Secretary that takes responsibility, the Home Secretary hasn’t even appeared in public since this crisis broke on Thursday night – indeed we had to learn about it from the newspapers rather than learn from it actually from her and what she was going to do about it.
“There is a culture of not taking responsibility and it is corrosive, frankly, to the quality of governance right across the Cabinet.”
Home Office Minister Mr Malthouse said last Friday that the PNC was a large database that requires maintenance, but a “human error” had introduced defective coding that had led to some records being deleted.
He added that officials had “put a stop to the problem so it can’t reoccur”.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council said it is working closely with the Government to resolve any potential impact on policing operations.
The Times, which first reported the data loss, said crucial intelligence about suspects had vanished because of the blunder and Britain’s visa system was thrown into disarray, with the processing of applications being suspended for two days.
According to a letter to police chiefs later leaked to the newspaper, 213,000 offence records, 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 person records have potentially been deleted in error from the system.
A Minister who actually took responsibility would be a novelty. Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds.