Subject Access Procedures Should Not Be Made Redundant

With the current economic climate and the likelihood of an increase in employment disputes and redundancies, it is inevitable that we will also see an increase in subject access requests and perhaps a greater number of requests made to the Information Commissioner to investigate the current data protection practices of those businesses.

With this in mind it is crucial that businesses know how to identify a subject access request when it comes in and how to respond to it, so those who run the business can be left to get on with doing just that, running a business.

The Data Protection Act 1998 (the "Act") contains a general right granted to data subjects to be informed by a data controller of whether processing about them is carried out and to have communicated to them in an intelligible form the details of what information they process.