As central government has burgeoned, ministers have been content with success but find blame ever harder to accept. They respond to failure not by streamlining their departments and directing resources to the frontline, but by the opposite. They hire consultants, reorganise departments and agencies and spend billions on computers. Well-publicised fiascos over the NHS computer, the ID card computer, the passports computer, the farm payments computer and innumerable defence computers make the postwar groundnuts scandal look small beer. One report last year suggested that computer failure had wasted taxpayers £26bn since 2000. The incompetence is stupendous, yet there has been no audit, no accountability, no halt to crazy procurement.

A classic was the fate of the Home Office’s “e-Borders” computer, sold by Raytheon to a gullible Jacqui Smith as home secretary in 2007. A billion pounds was blown, scanning took up to 80% longer, and there were doubts about legality. The government “lost confidence” and axed the contract in 2010, with a £500m dispute about fees. Again, there has been no apparent audit of the loss. If this was Greece we would have Germans crawling all over us.

Computer Weekly reported in 2009 that under a third of government computers are completed to anything like the original form. Yet ministers continue to buy them. Computers are the utopian answer to the ambitions of centralising ministers. No matter that they cannot deliver the subtleties of human discretion required of public servants in the “post-digital” age.

Borders can’t be made impermeable by computer. Efficient control must rely on the judgment of frontline staff, and supervisors who can permit risk. They will not permit risk if being sacked, reorganised and second-guessed by distant ministers when things go wrong. Airport queues will just get longer.

Details of every phone call and text message, email traffic and websites visited online are to be stored in a series of vast databases under new Government anti-terror plans.

Landline and mobile phone companies and broadband providers will be ordered to store the data for a year and make it available to the security services under the scheme.

The databases would not record the contents of calls, texts or emails but the numbers or email addresses of who they are sent and received by.

For the first time, the security services will have widespread access to information about who has been communicating with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook.

Direct messages between subscribers to websites such as Twitter would also be stored, as well as communications between players in online video games.

The Home Office is understood to have begun negotiations with internet companies in the last two months over the plan, which could be officially announced as early as May.

It is certain to cause controversy over civil liberties – but also raise concerns over the security of the records.

London councils want unprecedented access to confidential driver and vehicle data to tackle illegal parking.

Town halls are considering using the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database to manage permits and fines, but campaigners fear it will lead to more incorrect tickets being issued and increased surveillance of drivers.

The DVLA said councils now have only limited access to information about abandoned or “nuisance” vehicles, or to help combat fly-tipping.

It has had requests from Newham, Kingston, Kensington and Chelsea, Southwark and Camden councils for blanket online access to its database, plus a “consortium” application from London Councils, parent body of the 32 boroughs.

The requests have so far been refused, the DVLA said. London Councils said access would “provide a cheaper, more efficient, paperless parking system”.

The true number of people who were wrongly linked to crimes or misrepresented is ten times greater than annual Home Office figures suggest, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

The scale of errors made in background checks was only revealed through Freedom of Information requests.

Annual error statistics published by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) regularly suggested around 200 people are wrongly accused each year.

However, those figures only refer to errors made directly by CRB staff when carrying out checks and disclosing information.

Once errors made by other agencies who contribute to background checks, such as the police and education officials, are included, the figures run in to the thousands.

Since 2003, a total 19,551 disputes over inaccurate CRB checks have been upheld.

For 2010/11, the official inaccuracy figure stood at 172, but the new statistics show the true level of error for that year was 2,343.

Plans to force households to have energy smart meters installed have been shelved over health and privacy fears.

The Government had promised that every household would have a smart meter by 2019 in a �12 billion programme to stop gas and electricity bills being estimated.

Officials are devising plans to allow people to reject the smart meters, which communicate remotely from households to energy companies.

The move is a victory for campaign groups and backbench MPs, who raised concerns with ministers that the devices emit electromagnetic radiation 24 hours a day and cannot be turned off.

Privacy campaigners were worried that half-hourly data on energy usage collected by smart meters could give clues about people�s way of life, such as when someone is on holiday, at work or asleep. Sources in the Department for Energy and Climate Change said the proposal was shelved to avoid the programme getting �bogged down� in lengthy legal disputes.

Concerns about personal privacy appeared in a “significant” number of responses to the government’s consultation on transparency and open data, the Cabinet Office revealed today.

A summary of responses to last year’s consultation on “Making Open Data Real”, says that respondents “expressed concern that the consutlation failed to address the interaction between personal data… with open data, and the potential for open data to have a negative impact on confidentiality and privacy.”

The officil consultation summary and all the responses can be accessed via the Cabinet Office web page.