January 09, 2012
Powys County Council has been fined a record £130,000 for breach of the Data Protection Act after the details of a child protection case were sent to the wrong recipient.
According to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), the penalty is the highest that the ICO has served since April 2010 and the size is a reaction to a similar incident, although less serious, which was reported by the council in June last year.
The major breach of data protection occurred in February, when two separate reports about child protection cases were sent to the same shared printer. It is thought that two pages from one report were then mistakenly collected with the papers from another case and were sent out without being checked.
As a result, the recipient mistakenly received the two pages of the report and knew the identities of the parent and child whose personal details were included in the papers.
The similar incident - which was reported to the ICO in June 2010 – happened when a social worker sent information relating to a vulnerable child to the same recipient. In this case, the child named in the report was again known to the recipient.
In June, the ICO highlighted the need for the council to introduce mandatory training and to tighten up its security measures. The ICO also warned the council that further action would be taken if a similar incident occurred again.
“This is the third UK council in as many weeks to receive a monetary penalty for disclosing sensitive information about vulnerable people,” said Assistant Commissioner for Wales, Anne Jones.
“It’s the most serious case yet and it has attracted a record fine. The distress that this incident would have caused to the individuals involved is obvious and made worse by the fact that the breach could have been prevented if Powys County Council had acted on our original recommendations.
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