Phew! Data disaster report won’t hurt Brown

The trouble is, there’s another report coming close behind it, says our Westminster insider

There is growing confidence in the Brown camp that the interim report on the recent 'data disaster' - in which the tax files of 25 million people went astray - will prove no more explosive than a Christmas cracker.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, is ready to deliver a Commons statement on Monday after receiving the interim findings from PricewaterhouseCooper's chairman Kieran Poynter. The word around Downing Street is that Poynter has found a damaging amount of incompetence among the civil servants at HM Revenue and Customs, but it cannot be laid at Brown's door.

Edward Leigh, the florid-faced Tory chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, is likely to be apoplectic at the findings. Leigh has led the Tory charge over HMRC, uncovering damaging e-mails between officials at the National Audit Office, which his committee

oversees, and HMRC. The e-mails show HMRC sent the NAO some discs containing vast amounts of data on seven million families in receipt of child benefit because HMRC officials did not want to 'incur a cost' by extracting the details the Audit Office had requested for its routine checks.

Leigh has demanded the appearance before the Public Accounts Committee of a senior HMRC executive who took this crass decision. The executive is currently hiding behind the Osmotherly Rules, which allow civil servants to withhold information.

The executive's decision proves, says Leigh, that there are 'systemic failures' within the HMRC, and they were caused by the merger which Brown introduced when he was Chancellor. Leigh is not interested in identifying the hapless clerk who put the CDs in the post.

The PAC committee, which is carrying out its own investigation, is assisted by indignant officials at the NAO who have been made to look incompetent by the clots at the HMRC. Leigh's findings are likely to be far more explosive than Poynter's - but they won't be delivered until the New Year.