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Kensington and Chelsea Council fined £120,000 for empty homes disclosure
Kensington and Chelsea Council has been fined £120,000 by the UK’s information watchdog for accidentally revealing the owners of empty homes in the borough.
It passed the names and addresses of 943 people with vacant properties to three national newspaper journalists who had requested the information under Freedom of Information laws.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled that the council acted unlawfully by identifying the people.
It came around six weeks after the Grenfell Tower fire in June, when some were calling for empty homes in Kensington and Chelsea to be requisitioned to house survivors.
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In a report on the case, the ICO said the disclosure constituted “a serious contravention” of data protection laws due to “the number of affected data subjects, the sensitive nature of the personal data that was disclosed to the applicants in the context of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, and the potential consequences [sic]”.
The information was released in a ‘pivot table’ – a type of Excel spreadsheet which hides underlying data from view until the user double clicks on a cell.
Kensington and Chelsea Council did not provide its information team “with any (or any adequate)” Excel training and “had in place no guidance” for staff to check for hidden data in pivot tables, the ICO ruled.
However, the ICO decided against a larger fine because the council reported the incident to the commissioner and took “substantial remedial action”.
A spokesperson for Kensington and Chelsea Council said: “It was an error and we apologise. We accept the fine, and we have reviewed our processes to prevent this happening again.”
