Please keep lumbering on after the uptake. It's sure to tire eventually.

Given the posts above about "Need to Know" and "Hush! Keep mum!!" the UK Govt's ability to endanger a load of people with a simple New Years Honours List makes it all look like people were barking up the wrong tree.............

Those who know don't talk, those who talk don't know.

That will explain the explosion of ignorance 😁

As said earlier, after the "cock-up" at the Cabinet Office over the addresses on the New Year Honours List then surely any comments here regarding "secrecy" are now worthy of being extended to more of the Civil Service especially!

Remember when all addresses were published in the phone book? And anyone who is a company director has their full details including postal address published on the Companies House website.

At a guess I expect the "leaker" of personal details was about SEO level, unsupervised, output not checked, late at night.

And what will happen to him/her/self-identifying as/ ?

Very very difficult to sack, although such an error in the real world would call for it. Admonished, moved sideways, unpromotable probably.

I was such a civil servant, MoD. My output, and my people's output, was checked and signed for routinely.

The culprit certainly made a bad mistake, but the process was flawed, so somewhere up the chain is another person about to have a hard time.

If the civil service is to get the kick up the arse we are promised, the kicking could start here.

I do not hold my breath.

langleybaston,

In today's Civil Service this mistake was most likely committed by a contractor or a supplier, and in the Home Office a few levels above SEO for certain, not sure about how the Cabinet Office structures their grades and levels as they all differ by individual Dept when you get above SEO.

Thank you ................. I am surprised and disappointed but I suppose I should not be.

Having significantly more direct & current knowledge than certain posters here on the issue of the breach, I'd suggest it is not contractors (CO doesnt rely on them in the main), and that cock up over conspiracy is what is likely to have happened here. I suspect the person who did it made a very genuine mistake, the shame of which they will carry for the rest of their life. For a first offence, I wouldnt look to fire them, I would look to see where the training went wrong to prevent this from happening in the first place.

Let he/she who hasnt at one stage in their life in HMG/Military not made an error cast the first stone here.

As for the utter muppets who assume that the original issue of the thread is a subject worthy of discussion because apparently the bad guys know it anyway - I'm not sure I have enough words in my dictionary to discuss the utter contempt I hold you in for wanting to put national security at risk for the sake of your pathetic ego.

They have my sympathies JimLad - I'll bet no-one ever mentioned that not everyone would want their addressii published. Probably it was the person who's job it is to write a puff for each local news outlet through the UK -"Mrs Scroggins of Acacia Drive was awarded an MBE " and they had no idea about security

Jimlad, most points taken but TRAINING needed?

Surely this is a process fault, a system fault?

May I give an example from my Met. career?

Aircraft landing at an airfield need [or used to need back in the day!] barometric pressure to set altimeter in order to to land at zero feet above touchdown point. This is safety critical, many a disaster can be laid at the door of a miss-set altimeter. If I remember correctly a 10 millibar error [very humanly possible] translates to 300 feet. Met. Office observer reads pressure every hour [and more often as needs be in periods of rapid changes] and reports it to ATC [and other interested parties].

Met. System to eradicate error. All transactions are timed/ recorded to nearest minute.
1. Observer has a running check board of pressure, thus sudden unexplained changes seen for what they are, and barometer read again by observer..
2. Forecaster or supervisor checks the pressure and initials as having checked
3. Observer passes pressure to ATC [along with remainder of weather observation] and in times of rapid change has it read back and obtains initials therefrom.

Apologies if the above is blindingly obvious.

Applicability to Honours List is, I submit, obvious. Don't blame the issuer, blame the system or blame the supervisor.

And I agree wholeheartedly about the muppets.

I have a feeling that the Honours System and words like Security, data protection, checking are a million miles apart.

A feeling? Well, we don't want facts getting in the way of another cheap shot, do we?

langleybaston will have it, lack of process.

You couldn't be more wrong, well at least on the parts of the Honours system I've been involved with. It's one of the most closely-guarded things we do at classifications below SECRET. Recommendations and notes on deliberations are very tightly controlled. And as for checking, it's probably the most deliberated-over, proofread and redrafted-for-every-level-of-command pieces of work left in the e-working era. The whole process is hugely time-consuming, which unfortunately is why one of the critical determinants of success is having a commander who prioritises it sufficiently highly to spend hours producing perfectly-polished staff work. All very well being idealistic and saying that it's a commander's duty, but there are only so many working days that can be set aside for it (and that is the scale of time involved in doing it properly).

Common sense, logical thinking and the bleeding obvious for some reason appear not to be around that much these days, it isn't the first time something like this has occurred and probably won't be the last!

I'm sure it is in the services Easy - but at Cabinet Office etc? I doubt it - for a start it's hard to believe the brightest and the best in the Civil Service are involved in the twice yearly allocation of gongs (other than to ensure they get one) - most likely the office junior or someone seeing out time until their pension.

Actually the Honours and Awards Secretariat is a pretty in demand place to work.

My instinct, nothing more, is that this may be as simple as someone attaching the wrong file to be published, and that it was as simple as that - click on the wrong attachment and send for publication.