Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

Enforced subject access requests prohibited from 10 March

26 Feb 2015, 5:22 pm

Companies will be banned from forcing individuals to request the disclosure of their personal information by third parties and requiring the individuals to share that information with them. The ban on enforced subject access requests will come into force in the UK on 10 March.

The change in the law will take effect after The Data Protection Act 1998 (Commencement No. 4) Order 2015 was published on the UK statue book by justice minister Simon Hughes.

The commencement order brings into force for the first time the rules contained under section 56 of the Data Protection Act (DPA). Under that section, it is a criminal offence to require a person to make a subject access request and reveal the result. It is the only provision in the DPA which has not yet come into force.

The change in the law is being implemented after wider reforms to the criminal records checking regime were implemented last year.

Those reforms shorten the 'rehabilitation periods' for the majority of criminal convictions in England and Wales, meaning that they will be considered 'spent' sooner and need no longer be disclosed for most purposes. Fuller disclosure of cautions and convictions continue to apply to certain 'sensitive' occupations and activities, while the most serious convictions remain subject to disclosure for any job.

Last year, the Information Commissioner's Office said that although enforced subject access requests were typically used to force potential employees to reveal criminal conviction data, the practice had "persisted and spread". It said enforced subject access requests were being used by "organisations as diverse as insurers when dealing with claims and TV production companies when selecting participants for their programmes".

Jonathan Bamford, head of strategic liason at the ICO, said at the time: "It is not only a clear perversion of an individual's own rights, with consequences like unwarranted loss of employment opportunities, it also [undermines] important public polices such as the rehabilitation of offenders. The information provided in a police subject access response, for instance, is potentially far greater than an individual would ever have to declare to a prospective employer, and would include convictions considered 'spent' under the Rehabilitation of Offences Act."