Police forces hold material about people that almost no other organisation holds: allegations, intelligence, custody records, medical notes taken in detention. The rules that apply to it are stricter than the ones covering ordinary personal data, not looser.
What counts as a breach
The obvious case is a leak, but it is not the common one. The patterns that recur are:
- an officer looking up records for a personal reason rather than a policing one
- disclosure to a third party who had no right to it, including to an ex-partner or a family member
- information about a witness or informant reaching the person it needed protecting from
- retention of records long after any lawful basis for keeping them has gone
- an enhanced criminal record certificate carrying material that should not have been on it
Law enforcement processing sits under Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018, which sets its own regime rather than relying on the general one.
Compensation for distress alone
Article 82 of the UK GDPR gives a right to compensation for material or non-material damage. Non-material damage means distress, and it does not require any financial loss at all. That is a meaningfully lower threshold than most civil claims.
It is not automatic. The Court of Appeal in Lloyd v Google LLC [2019] EWCA Civ 1599, reversed on other grounds by the Supreme Court at [2021] UKSC 50, and the High Court in Rolfe v Veale Wasbrough Vizards LLP [2021] EWHC 2809 (QB), have both made clear that trivial breaches causing no real distress do not found a claim.
The free route first
You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at no cost, and you can do that whether or not you ever bring a claim. The ICO can require a force to change what it does, which a compensation claim cannot.
How long you have to bring a claim
Publishing a general figure here would be worse than publishing nothing, because a reader who relies on the wrong one loses their claim outright. Get your own position checked, and do it early rather than late.
The free routes, before any claim
A complaint to the force costs nothing and does not stop you claiming later. If the force's answer does not stand up you can apply for a review, and across all forces reporting, 24.5% of completed reviews found the force's own outcome was not reasonable and proportionate.
The three routes, and what each one gets you.
Start with your force
Complaint handling, review outcomes and stop and search practice vary enormously between forces. Every force has its own page here with its own figures.