Year in Review: Public Sector in 2009

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So when party conference season came about Prime Minister Gordon Brown conceded and told the public ID cards would not become compulsory for UK citizens and the information needed for them would be reduced to that which was already on a passport.

A trial of ID cards began in Manchester late last month making them available to the public for the first time at a cost of £30 and the cards are due to roll out across the North West in January.

But the controversy has yet to die down, with Liverpool Council voting to ban the promotion of them within its own offices.

Seems like Brown and his cabinet have some way to go in convincing us these cards are the way forward.

Once more into the data breach

It doesn’t seem that long ago that HM Revenues and Customs lost two disks in the internal post containing data of over 25 million people does it?

This was back in 2007 and since then a plethora of data loss stories have come into the limelight.

This year the local council seemed to become the biggest culprit. The month of May saw the turn of Leicester City Council, which lost an unencrypted USB stick containing personal information on 80 children from a council-run nursery.

Yet the council only got a slight tap on the wrist and was told by the Information Commissioner’s Office to better train its staff.

Barely a month had gone by when in June Manchester City Council also lost valuable personal data in the form of two council-owned laptops from its Town Hall.

One of the laptops contained personal details relating to 1,754 employees at local schools and neither were encrypted.

Here the ICO went a bit further than training and insisted that Sir Howard Bernstein, Manchester City Council's chief executive, signed an agreement to ensure all laptops and other removable devices were encrypted from then on.

As the Summer ended, the Autumn scandals arose and this time north of the border in Scotland. In September, NHS Education for Scotland admitted to losing an unencrypted laptop which contained information on 6,000 medical trainee applicants.

The continuing loss of data and lack of security by public bodies has led to calls for Data Encryption laws similar to those in the US and Germany, forcing public bodies and companies to take the risks more seriously.

But we will have to wait and see what 2010 brings and whether government will listen to its critics.

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