The Home Office recorded a 120 per cent rise in data loss incidents between 2018 and 2020.

According to analysis of the Home Office’s annual report and accounts compiled by the Parliament Street think tank, 1,895 individual data loss incidents occurred in the financial year 2018 to 2019, rising to 4,204 incidents in the most recent financial year, 2019 to 2020.

The data also revealed that the most common incident was loss of inadequately protected electronic equipment, devices or paper documents from outside secured government premises.

A total of 2,404 incidents of this nature were recorded in 2019 to 2020 compared to just 702 the year before, marking a 242 per cent increase.

A further 946 incidents of lost electronic equipment or documents from secured government premises was also recorded in 2019 to 2020, up from 145 in 2018 to 2019 – a 552 per cent increase.

Of the 4,204 incidents in 2019 to 2020, a total of 25 were flagged as being particularly severe, and fell within the criteria for notifying the Information Commissioner’s Office. This figure was down from the 35 severe incidents recorded from the year before.

The most common reason for these severe incidents is due to ‘unauthorised disclosure’, the analysis found, with 11 of 25 incidents in 2019 to 2020 were due to this reason, as well as 26 out of 35 from the previous year.

Andy Harcup, vice president of sales at Absolute Software, said: “It’s vital that key government departments like The Home Office take data security seriously, as these figures indicate a myriad of losses of critical devices and data, some of which were so serious they had to be reported to the regulator.

“It’s not uncommon for a missing file or laptop to fall into the wrong hands, giving hackers and cyber criminals access to critical public data."

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