[reposted from LinkedIn]
Claims in misuse of private information, data protection and for breach of the Human Rights Act, by a dismissed further education teacher against Tameside College and three employees are struck out/subject to summary judgment for the defendant.
The claimant was initially suspended after evidence came to light that he had been dismissed from previous roles. The College’s investigation involved the sending of reference requests to two previous employers, and was also informed by disclosures of Facebook and WhatsApp messages which revealed the teacher had, contrary to instruction, communicated with students on social media whilst suspended, and “sent a threatening message to a WhatsApp Group chat comprising members of staff”.
The deputy master found that in relation to the misuse of private information claims, although the claimant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the social media messages, “those expectations were greatly outweighed by the need to investigate those messages for the purposes of the disciplinary process”. These were subject to summary judgment for the defendant.
The data protection and human rights claims against individual employees were bound to fail, as they were neither data controllers nor public authorities.
As to the data protection claim against the college, a previous determination by the ICO that the sending of the reference requests was not fair and transparent, because it was contrary to the claimant’s expectations, was wrong: it was “plain that it ought to have been well within the Claimant’s reasonable expectation that, in order to investigate whether he had failed to disclose the fact of his dismissal from those two institutions, each would be contacted and asked about it.”
The college’s processing was lawful under Article 6(1)(b) and (c) of the UK GDPR: “The processing was necessary for the purposes of the contract of employment between the [college] and the Claimant and for the performance of the [college’s] obligations to its other staff, and to safeguard and promote the welfare of its students.” The various safeguarding legal duties and obligations on the college established a clear legal basis for the processing.
Similarly, the human rights claims against the college, which included complaints of unlawful monitoring and surveillance, were bound to fail: “There is no real prospect of establishing a breach of Article 8 for the same reasons that there is no real prospect of establishing misuse of private information. The alleged breaches of Articles 10 and 11 appear to relate to the College’s instructions to the Claimant not to communicate with other staff except with permission. The instruction was plainly a reasonable one made for a legitimate purpose.”
Accordingly, the data protection and Human Rights Act claims were struck out.
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
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