Data Protection (and other) compensation awarded against Ombudsman

I’ve been helpfully referred to a rather remarkable judgment of the Leeds County Court, in a claim for damages against the Local Government Ombudsman for, variously, declaratory relief and damages arising from discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, and breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). The claim was resoundingly successful, and led to a total award of £12,500, £2,500 of which were aggravated damages because of the conduct of the trial by the respondent.

The judgment has been uploaded to Dropbox here.

I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions about the actions of the Ombudsman, but it’s worth noting, when one reads the trenchant criticism by District Judge Geddes, that one of the office’s strategic objectives is to

deliver effective redress through impartial, rigorous and proportionate investigations

One can only conclude that, in this case at least, this objective was very far from met.

Of particular relevance for this blog, though, was the award of £2500 for distress arising from failure to prepare and keep an accurate case file recording the disability of the claimant and her daughter. This, held the District Judge, was a contravention of the Ombudsman’s obligations under the DPA. As is now relatively well known, the DPA’s original drafting precluded compensation for distress alone (in the absence of tangible – e.g. financial – damage), but the Court of Appeal, in Vidal Hall & ors v Google ([2015] EWCA Civ 311), held that this was contrary to the provisions of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and that, accordingly, there was a right under the DPA to claim compensation for “pure” distress. The award in question here was of “Vidal Hall” compensation, with the judge saying there was

no doubt in my mind that the data breaches have caused distress to the claimant in their own rights as well as as a result of the consequences that flowed.

The views in this post (and indeed all posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.