The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which polices the security of the nation’s data, is to be given the power to raid Government departments suspected of breaching protection laws.

The move, announced today by Gordon Brown, comes in response to the loss by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) of personal details of some 25 million Britons. The Prime Minister said the ICO would be given extra powers to carry out “spot checks” of government departments.

However, it is unclear whether the new powers will extend to companies - something that Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, is pressing for.

"Alarm bells must ring in every boardroom," Mr Thomas said today.

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He added: "For some time I have been pressing the government to give my Office the power to audit and inspect organisations that process people’s personal information without first having to get their consent."

Mr Thomas also repeated a call for the law to be "changed to make security breaches of this magnitude a criminal offence."

Under present legislation HMRC is likely to avoid serious legal sanctions because of what experts have called the “UK’s toothless data regime”.

A spokesman for the ICO said today that the office wanted new “powers of audit and inspection that would allow us access to organisations without their consent”.

This would put it on a par with groups such as the European competition authorities, which are able to launch dawn raids on groups suspected of breaking the law, he said.

At present, the ICO, which says that it is short-staffed, can obtain a search warrant through the courts only if it suspects that data is being bought and sold illegally, for instance, by private detectives.

Under the Data Protection Act (DPA), the ICO will be able to serve only an enforcement notice on HMRC, calling for it not to repeat the catastrophic series of blunders that led to the loss of the personal details of more than seven million families.

Only if the terms of such a notice are broken can the ICO take legal action.

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