Everyone makes mistakes but what's the worst kind? The one you repeat - and that's when you know you're in serious trouble.

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs made a horrendous blunder when it lost two discs last week containing the sensitive information of every family claiming child benefit.

Millions of families have been put at risk of fraud - 72,000 of them in Oxfordshire.

Up stepped senior ministers last week looking very grave and saying 'sorry, it won't happen again'. They also claimed there was no evidence that the discs had fallen into the wrong hands, conveniently glossing over the logical next step that there is no evidence they haven't.

The Government was extremely fortunate the following day that England's failure to qualify for the European Championships took a lot of heat off them.

But you'd have expected the HMRC to perhaps begin to be a little bit more careful.

Certainly if you were a manager in the department, you'd be making sure your staff didn't make any more blunders.

Now we report how the HMRC sent out sensitive National Insurance details of former council staff and even a cheque for £2,000 to pensioner Ron Leaver. He was honest and contacted them but it seems to have made little difference.

And, following the vanishing discs, an apology letter for the original mistake went out to the wrong person - and with it information fraudsters would love to get their hands on.

Why did that apology letter contain National Insurance and Child Benefit numbers?

Why couldn't it just be addressed to the recipient with nothing else, given that thousands of these letters are going out into a post system and again could end up in unintended hands?

It beggars belief.

The Home Office was condemned as being not fit for purpose. The HMRC is rapidly becoming not fit for ANY purpose.