Data Protection - How Employers Can Avoid Being Penalised

Article by Stephen Musgrave and Nadia Hussein, Bird & Bird LLP Employment Group

HR practitioners have been living fairly comfortably with the data protection enforcement regime for many years, even after the storm of data security problems that hit the UK in recent years. Most memorably, in 2007 HMRC lost two CD-Roms containing personal data of 25 million individuals. At around the same time three million records of candidates for the UK Driving Theory Test on a hard drive were lost by Pearson – not even in the UK, but in Iowa. And on 15 Dec 2007 Ministry of Justice CDs containing details of defendants before the Manchester Magistrates Court went missing in the post.

The penalties for this sort of transgression have recently increased dramatically.