I'm sorry I missed the origins of this story while I was on holiday, but fortunately it has leapt back to life giving me a second chance.
Yesterday, many of the news headlines concerned Gordon Brown's apparent reversal of a proposed one-off £150-pound payment to help offset expected rises in household energy bills this winter. What I hadn't realised was the the original rumours started circulating after a senior civil servant was overheard discussing the idea with a colleague while travelling to London by train. Sir Brian Bender, a Permanent Secretary at the Dept for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), is reported as saying that the payment would be aimed at "ordinary people"... more specifically, those drawing child benefit.
Perhaps this was intended as some kind of oblique compensation for all those whose child benefit records were lost in the HMRC data breach. I couldn't possibly comment.
Sir Brian's conversation took place in a First Class carriage of the 15:05 from Leeds to London; according to the rail company's website, a first-class single on that service costs £154... just fractionally more than the rebate under discussion.
What I found more interesting, though, was that a fellow passenger was able, from the overheard conversation, to identify Sir Brian by searching for his photo on the DBERR website. Not quite two years ago, David Blunkett was expressing the view that "As you walk down the street you expect to be able to have a private conversation". Oh, the irony.
Still, I suppose it's good to know that not every public sector data breach in the UK is attributable to ill-considered use of technology.
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Welcome back from holidays! Presumably you haven't lost your fingerprints! :-)
Re government assistance for energy, here in the U.S.:
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ocs/liheap/
A lot of people on fixed income here (i.e. social security) couldn't make it without this.
Posted by Carolyn on September 05, 2008 at 03:34 PM GMT+00:00 #