Do you really trust this lot with your data?

Government staff are misplacing their security passes at a rate of 23 a day, it has emerged. Almost 17,000 civil service passes have been lost or stolen over the past two years. Around two thirds of the misplaced cards have been misplaced by staff at the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The figures follow a series of other security lapses by civil servants, including an incident where highly sensitive intelligence files on al-Qaeda were left on a train by a senior Whitehall official. In January last year, a laptop with the details of 600,000 people on it was taken from a Royal Navy officer’s car in Birmingham, and in November 2007, two CDs with details of 25 million Britons were lost after being posted from a Revenue and Customs office in Tyne and Wear.

This government cannot and should not be trusted with our personnel information. All this latest incident does is demonstrate the serious issues around data security should National ID cards be introduced.

Schools still failing teenagers

Government education adviser Mike Tomlinson estimates that up to 25,000 teenagers are leaving school before starting to study for GCSEs. In other words, thousands of young people are dropping out of school early because the education system has let them down.

This shows just how ludicrous it is for the Government to raise the education leaving age when it can’t even get 14 year olds to turn-up. Ministers need to get a grip on this problem and create a system which motivates and challenges all young people.

Instead of producing more targets and gimmicks, ministers need to provide a better range of vocational qualifications and allow students to access college education from age 14.

Every UK home could be made energy-efficient within 10 years

Every UK home could be made energy-efficient within 10 years in a revamp of British housing stock equivalent to the "digital switchover".

It is estimated that carbon emissions from British homes account for a quarter of the country's total. Under EU agreements, the government has 42 years to cut emissions by 80%.

Currently just one per cent of our housing stock is energy-efficient, yet only half of Britain's poorest households are ineligible for help from the £852m “Warm Front” scheme set up by the government to try to cut fuel bills with grants for home insulation and heating.

The government should underwrite renovation work worth £6,500 per household. Householders should be able to apply for commercial loans to revamp their homes, with the cost being repaid through energy bills that should fall because of improved energy efficiency of the renovated house.

One third of suspected crimes fail to reach court

Almost a third of criminal suspects arrested in the past year were not charged, government figures have shown.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, has admitted that out of 550,000 cases leading to arrests last year, 160,000 were dropped.

This is a substantially higher number than was expected by the government and we need to know why.

Either police are not preparing cases as well as they should be, which seems unlikely, or the Crown Prosecution Service are getting more choosy about when to charge.

We owe it to the victims concerned to get to the bottom of this. At the moment it is out of order that so many cases are being investigated and then nothing happens.

Anti-knife campaign fails as crime soars

We are facing a crimewave which is being fuelled by the recession. Latest figures show a big rise in knife-point robberies, burglaries, and fraud.

Robberies at knife-point are up 18 per cent, domestic burglaries are up four per cent and fraud or forgery is up 16 per cent.

More people died last year as a result of stabbings than at any time since records began. The Home Office figures show that robberies involving “knives or sharp instruments” were up 18 per cent between July and September last year, compared with the same period in 2007.

Fatal stabbings increased by 10 per cent to 270 in 2007-8, the highest since records began in 1977.

Domestic burglaries were up for the first time since 2002, by four per cent from 66,900 between July and September 2007 to 69,700 in the same period last year.

Other types of burglary were also up, by three per cent.

Drugs offences were nine per cent higher in July to September 2008 than in the same quarter the previous year and fraud and forgery increased by 16 per cent.

There is now clear evidence of rising crime as the recession bites.

The effectiveness of the anti-knife crime campaign launched by the government last June is questionable. The Government has failed to effectively roll out the measures that we know work against knife crime.

Posturing about penalties is no substitute for the hard graft of visible and intensive policing.

Labour's housing failure as repossessions soar

Yesterday, it was announced that repossessions were rising at an alarming rate; today we hear that the number of households on local authority housing waiting lists has hit 1.77 million - official statistics show this is up 100,000 on last year.

With the banks overstretching their credit facilities it could well mean that in the coming months that councils will have to help pick up the pieces as people end up on social housing waiting lists.

Since Labour took power 12 years ago the council house waiting list has risen from one million to almost 1.8 million, showing this Government has failed to build anywhere near the number of social homes Britain desperately needs.

The Government’s response to the social housing crisis is not only inadequate but scandalous. It is essential that the Government uses the current economic crisis to allow councils and housing associations to buy up land to build new social houses for the increasing number of families left waiting for social housing.

By allowing social housing to wither, the Government has let down hundreds of thousands of families.