In a case I dealt with recently, a group of disgruntled shareholders wished to make life difficult for the Board. They therefore submitted a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office that personal information about an employee had been divulged by a director, without the employee’s agreement. The employee himself was not bothered and did not make any complaint, given that the information divulged was already in the public domain. Nevertheless, the ICO took it upon themselves to investigate the matter even though there had been no complaint from the “data subject” i.e. the employee. The Data Protection Act 1998 does not require there to be a complaint from the data subject for the ICO to carry out an investigation. Surely that cannot be right? If the data subject has no problem with the information being divulged, it appears to me to be a terrible waste of public funds to carry out an investigation. The ICO sent no less than four, yes four officers to our client’s premises to investigate the matter, after which no action was taken.

If you have had any similar problems with the ICO, let me know, as I am starting to gather information on cases such as this.

What short memories politicians have! For those of us with (some!) grey hair, it seems like only yesterday that the minimum service requirement to be able to claim unfair dismissal reduced from two years to one, in 1998. The reason for that change was that it was felt that requiring employees to have at least two years service would be disproportionately discriminatory against women, who as a group are less likely to be able to reach the two year service requirement due to childcare duties. That hasn’t changed, so if the requirement goes back to two years, all that will happen is that female employees will be able to argue discrimination instead of unfair dismissal – and unlike unfair dismissal, there’s no cap on discrimination claims. Please Mr Cameron, think again!