LONDON, Dec 17: British Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly said on Sunday the government had lost personal data belonging to three million British would-be drivers — the latest in a series of government blunders with sensitive records.

Details of the name, address and e-mail address of each candidate held on a hard drive were lost in Iowa City, Iowa, in the US, Kelly told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Kelly’s report follows the loss by tax officials of sensitive data — including banking records — on nearly half the population.

A series of reviews launched because of the errors has found that other government departments have concerns about data handling, but uncovered no new mishaps, Treasury chief Alistair Darling said in a statement to legislators.

The string of blunders has dented Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s hopes of introducing a national identity card system, which the government says is vital to enhance security and control immigration.

Brown hopes the cards, which will hold biographical and biometric data, will be introduced in 2009. The estimated cost of the program is 5.6 billion pounds (US$11.3 billion).

Two computer disks from the government’s tax and welfare department containing names, addresses, national insurance numbers and, in some cases, banking details, of 25 million adults and children disappeared while being sent by internal mail, ministers said last month.

Darling told legislators that interim investigations had found some failings in protocols on data handling in the department.

Kelly said details on driving test takers were stored on a hard disk drive and lost in May from a storage facility in Iowa. Britain’s Driving Standards Agency had hired a US-based private contractor, Pearson Driving Assessments Ltd, to handle the data.

Opposition Conservatives claim another mistake has led to the loss of a haul of cocaine, passports and illegal contraband from a government Revenue and Customs site at Coventry Airport in central England.

Revenue and Customs, the same department that lost the welfare data disks, confirmed a number of items are missing from the site, but declined to specify what they were.—AP