Millions of bank details missing

COMPUTER disks holding sensitive personal data on 25 million people and 7.25 million families have gone missing, British Chancellor Alistair Darling has admitted to MPs.

He said the details included names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit numbers, national insurance numbers and bank or building society account details.

Paul Gray, chairman of her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which lost the disks containing the government’s entire child benefit database, has resigned over the affair.

The staggering scale of the loss means information on senior politicians, police officers and leading industrialists will be included in the missing data, which contains records on nearly half Britain’s 60.5 million population.

The Metropolitan Police is leading the hunt for the two password-protected disks and trying to discover how they went astray in transit from benefit headquarters in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London. Mr Darling said they should not have been sent in the first place, as a junior official breached all HMRC procedures by transferring the discs via couriers TNT to the NAO.

Mr Darling stressed there was no evidence they had fallen into criminal hands and said the public would be protected against any fraud by the banking code.

It effectively means the personal details of virtually every family in the country with a child under 16 have gone missing.