A government department has admitted a serious data breach over its publication of the runaway tram accident report.

The Department of Environment, Food and Agriculture finally released the report last week, three months after a Freedom of Information request was submitted by Isle of Man Newspapers.

This delay resulted from consultation being carried out with the Department of Infrastructure and the Attorney General’s chambers over which information should be withheld.

The day after publishing the report on the government website on Tuesday, DEFA realised that redacted names could be read with the right software.

Chief executive officer Richard Lole contacted passengers to apologise for the serious error and to confirm that the Information Commissioner had been notified of the breach.

He wrote: ’It became apparent late on Wednesday evening that the redactions had not been properly applied, meaning that with the right software the report could be manipulated to remove the redactions.

’As a result, your name and address and some further details were accidently released, as we believe that it would have been possible for someone with an appropriate level of IT skills to discover the names and addresses of the witnesses and match those to the extracts from the witness statements.

’The original document was removed from the online disclosure log and has been replaced with a corrected version.

’Please accept my sincere apologies for this serious error in our administrative process. We have referred the breach to the Information Commissioner.

’Our internal investigation will continue and we will certainly be sharing any learning throughout the government to prevent this from happening again.’