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"A customer brought in a laptop for a standard repair and when one of my technical team began to dismantle the laptop, he found lodged underneath the keyboard a disk labeled 'Home Office: Confidential'. He came to me with it and I called the police," says the owner of the Manchester computer repair shop where the disc was discovered.

"Both the laptop and the disk were encrypted, thus safeguarding any information that might be stored on them," says a Home Office spokesperson, explaining that the disc was over four years old. "Investigations

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are now underway. It would be inappropriate to comment further while they are ongoing."

In recent months a number of data losses have embarrassed the government, beginning with the loss of 25 million records in November last year. The data was stored on CDs and sent from one department to another via a courier, but never arrived at its destination.

In December the records of 6,000 motorists were lost by the DVA, and in January the details of 600,000 people were lost on a MoD laptop.

Earlier this month a further 5,000 records were lost when an NHS laptop went missing.