“Information”, Albert Einstein concluded, “is not knowledge.” If there were any doubt as to the truth of this dictum, the spectacle of the British Government yesterday firmly ended it. In the space of barely an hour, the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, outlined an interim report into “Datagate” — the astonishing loss of the entire child benefit record base — only to be followed by his colleague, Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, who had to explain how details relating to three million learner drivers apparently went missing in, quite unbelievably, the US state of Iowa. Meanwhile, Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, took the opportunity to publish his opening thoughts on the efficiency of data protection across the whole of Whitehall, while “capability reviews” for the Treasury and Revenue & Customs became available. However, whether this information yielded any knowledge is debatable.

For these investigations were either too tentative or too sweeping to allow for a robust set of conclusions to be drawn about how information is acquired and overseen. Despite that, they hint at procedural and, critically, cultural failings that have occurred throughout Government and its agencies. From this, three key principles emerge.

The first is that data is not handled with sufficient rigour and consistency across Government. What are, in effect, different standards can be applied within sections of the same department, never mind the wider department, let alone from one outpost of the Whitehall empire to another.Whatever the formal rules might be, there seems an ad hoc quality to their application. The pressures from distinctive personalities in senior management, the demands of time and concerns about money each seem to play an unpredictable part in what decisions are taken when. It is, of course, important to maintain a degree of flexibility when shaping strategies about information. But there is a strong case for allowing the Information Commissioner much more scope for imposing a more coherent and reliable framework.

The second is that many of the troubles that have been encountered in the use of sensitive information often relate to the inadequacies of departmental computer systems.

Imprecise specifications, combined with cumbersome means of accessing specific data, often mean that agencies face an unappealing choice between allowing a small number of suitably senior executives to address relatively minor concerns (with inevitable delays) or permitting far more junior staff the power to search an entire network for this information, which might be cheaper and swifter but is invariably less secure. Even modest home computers can sometimes be wayward beasts: giant networks can simply multiply those hiccups. Whitehall is hardly unique in having spent fortunes on computers which then under-perform (it happens all the time in the private sector also), but the consequences of such debacles are catastrophic.

Instead, however, there is the far bigger question about the character of Government that stands above the technicalities of data protection. Too often, policies are devised first on the basis of perhaps noble ideals and then the matter of how they might be made to work comes later. In such instances, Whitehall has, at the behest of its political masters, to ask the IT industry to produce solutions to problems that no administration in the world has successfully answered. Simplicity has long ceased to be deemed a political virtue. Government would work better if it were.