ICO reprimand regarding handling of criminal intelligence files relating to OCGs

Freedom of information request reference no: 01.FOI.23.029396

I note you seek access to the following information:

The ICO has reprimanded you:

'The Commissioner has decided to issue a reprimand to MPS in respect of the following alleged infringements of the DPA 2018:

Section 38(4) of Part 3 of the DPA 2018 which states: “all reasonable steps must be taken to ensure that personal data which is inaccurate, incomplete or no longer up to date is not transmitted or made available for any of the law enforcement purposes.”'

The reprimand includes:

'It was of also of concern that MPS did not inform partner organisations of the incident until December 2020, more than six months after the discovery of the first issue. It is understood that MPS had to determine the scale and scope of the problem before it could inform partners fully.'

Please provide full details of the scale and the scope of the problem that you unearthed.

Decision

I have today decided to disclose the located information to you in full.

Please find below information pursuant to your request above.
Thank you for your enquiry asking for more detail around the reprimand issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office to the MPS in March 2023.

The initial problem was identified via the Home Office on 12 June 2020. It followed an intended minor change to the MPS Intelligence system in April 2020. This change inadvertently introduced erroneous code from the pre-production (test) system to the live. This original problem affected approximately 1840 MPS records, which were re-loaded to PND by August 2020.

Following the investigation into this matter, a further 1.8m MPS records were estimated as being missing from PND. At the time this was calculated as being just under 2.5% of all records ever sent to PND by the MPS since inception in 2011. 6.5m records were re-loaded into PND to correct the issue. The incident was closed in May 2022.

Whilst the missing MPS records were not displayed in PND, all the records/data were still available within the MPS source systems. PND users are aware of the need to contact Force Intelligence Bureaus for the most up to date intelligence and for other records that may not be in PND. When faults with a Force’s data feed to PND occur additional specific notification is provided to PND users to bring this to their attention and recommend direct contact with the Force concerned.

The MPS sought feedback from PND users on the ramifications of this issue. There is no indication this has impacted any operational activity. There is no evidence to suggest safety has been compromised, nor that there has been a release of inaccurate information. Whilst the MPS cannot categorically state that the absence of these records in PND has not detrimentally affected some operational investigations, we have found no evidence of this.

The MPS fully supported the Information Commissioners Office in relation to this matter and has accepted the recommendations in full.