Chipping Barnet MP THERESA VILLIERS charts a Government blunder in which the details of millions of people have gone missing.

Over the past week, the controversy surrounding improper donations to the Labour Party has knocked the story about the Government losing two CDs containing personal data for 25 million people out of the headlines. However, we should not let the latest scandal around Labour donations make us lose sight of what a catastrophic mistake the "disc-gate" controversy revealed.

On October 18, 2007, a junior official from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in Washington, Tyne and Wear, sent two CDs containing records for every family in the country claiming child benefit to the Audit Office in London. The delivery was neither recorded nor registered.

The discs should have arrived the next day.

Six days later, on October 24, HMRC was told by the Audit Office the discs had not arrived, so two more were dispatched. This time they were registered and arrived the next day.

On November 3, 15 days after the package should have arrived in London, senior managers were informed. They took a further week to tell the Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Seventeen days later, MPs were informed in Parliament.

Fourty-seven detectives from the Specialist and economic crime directorate were involved in the search operation.

The missing data included the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25 million people. In the wrong hands, fraudsters would have a field day.

HMRC has also confirmed that a further six data discs have gone missing in transit between its offices in Preston and London.

BBC's Watchdog TV programme is currently investigating complaints from its viewers that HMRC has consistently blundered with personal data over a long period. For example, the BBC recently reported that, in May 2007, HMRC gave one woman's bank details and other personal information to no less than 60 other people.

This farce has cost taxpayers thousands of pounds on the search operation alone. We keep being told that it was the mistake of a junior official, but the question is why was such a junior official given access to 25 million confidential personal records?

The inevitable conclusion people are drawing from this disaster is that the Government has failed in its first duty to protect the interests of the people they were elected to serve. I find it astounding in the light of what must be more or less the biggest breach in data security in British history, the Government still refuses to drop its unpopular plans for ID cards and a national identity database.

In the light of the incompetence and lack of care Mr Brown's Government has shown with child benefit records, how can it possibly be trusted with the massive amount of hugely sensitive personal data that would be collected under an ID card scheme?