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Information Commissioner Richard Thomas claims he has been told of 94 data breaches since November, with two-thirds from the public sector and the rest from the private sector. Half of the commercial breaches were from financial institutions.

According to Thomas, the breaches included the loss of laptops, computer disks, memory sticks and paper records, with some stolen and others lost in the

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post. They included a wide range of personal details, such as financial and health records.

Thomas says company bosses and civil servants were taking data protection more seriously, but that more must be done to "eradicate inexcusable security breaches."

"It is a sad fact that that you need rail crashes to increase rail safety, maybe you need data losses to increase awareness of the importance of data security," says Thomas.

"The government, banks and other organisations need to regain the public's trust by being far more careful with people's personal information. Once again I urge business and public sector leaders to make data protection a priority in their organisation."

A separate report by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform found that though spending on defences had tripled in the last six years, many organisations still failed to take basic steps to protect their computer systems and private data.