A controversial project to build a database containing details of every child in the UK has been postponed following the loss of 25 million personal records by HM Revenue and Customs earlier this month.

ContactPoint, a £224 million child database that was suggested after the murder of eight-year old Victoria Climbie in 2000 while under social security supervision, will be pushed back five months pending a security review.                                  

Kevin Brennan, the UK children’s minister, said in a statement that the fiasco surrounding the HMRC data "has raised questions about the safety of large scale personal data in other government systems, including ContactPoint".           

"Delaying the implementation of ContactPoint will enable the independent assessment of security procedures to take place as well as address the changes to ContactPoint that potential system users have told us they need," he added.

Meanwhile, the UK’s minister in charge of data protection, Michael Wills, said the proposal for a national identity register must be reevaluated following the HMRC data breach.

“I think we are obviously going to have to look at the National Identity Register again in the light of this,” Wills told a joint House of Commons and House of Lords select committee this week.

Further reading

Joined up government To date, the government has been poor at making use of the information it holds on citizens.