3 January 2008

Big data-users could fund stronger UK law enforcement

SA Mathieson

Parliament’s justice committee has backed the government’s plan to toughen the Data Protection Act – and says large-scale users of personal data should pay for the increased work in enforcing this law.

In a report issued on 3 January (PDF), the committee called for extra funding for the information commissioner’s office to exercise increased powers, through the introduction of a sliding scale of registration fees for data controllers.

Currently, all UK organisations which handle personal data pay a flat fee of £35 annually. “We note that he already considers that his resources are at a minimum,” the report commented of the information commissioner’s £10m budget, before the planned strengthening of the law.

The committee said it is “widely accepted” that the ICO should have “a substantial increase in [its] powers”, such as the ability to make unannounced site visits to check state-sector processing of personal data, which the prime minister Gordon Brown announced the day after HM Revenue and Customs’ loss of personal data on 25m people.

The committee said that information commissioner Richard Thomas, who gave evidence to the committee just before the HMRC breach was announced, had seen his warnings of the dangers of infosecurity breaches made last summer (republished by Infosecurity), “proved correct”.

The report notes data-sharing concerns over the UK’s identity card scheme, the ContactPoint database of all children in England and the Prüm Agreement, under which European Union states will make their data on citizens available to each other. It concludes that “there is a difficult balance to be struck” between the advantages of sharing data between government departments and protecting personal information.

UK'S RECENT DATA BREACHES

Details of three million learner drivers lost in Iowa (18 December 2007)

Norwich Union Life fined £1.26m (17 December 2007)

Northern Irish drivers agency loses data on 6000 drivers (14 December 2007)

ICO: consider privacy before installing new IT (11 December 2007)

Banks turn monitoring software to high (26 November 2007)

HMRC data loss: NAO request evidence (23 November 2007)

ICO gets right to spot check government departments in wake of HMRC privacy catastrophe (21 November 2007)

HMRC appears to be “bang to rights” says assistant commissioner (21 November 2007)

Missing child benefit CDs: what went wrong, and why it would have carried on regardless (21 November 2007)

UK government loses data on 25m Britons (20 November 2007)

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