The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued a formal reprimand to the Labour Party for failing to respond to Subject Access Requests (SARs) following a cyberattack in October 2021.
By November 2022, the party had 352 outstanding SARs, with 78% of them not being responded to within the required three-month timeframe, and more than half of the requests were delayed by more than a year. The ICO initiated an investigation after it received over 150 complaints about the party's handling of SARs between November 2021 and November 2022. The ICO found that a 'privacy inbox' had not been monitored during the period and contained approximately 646 additional SARs and 597 requests for personal information to be deleted. None of the requests had been responded to at the time of the investigtion.
The Labour Party has since addressed the backlog, including assigning three temporary staff members to tackle the outstanding requests, allocating additional funds, and implementing an action plan.
Additional commentary in The Guardian.
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