'Total mess' - Police fury at 'shoddy treatment' no compensation over breach that likely put personal info of all staff in hands of dissident republican
Police officers will be “angry and dismayed” by a “total mess” failure to pay damages over a data breach that exposed the personal information of the PSNI’s entire workforce, leaving many fearing for their safety.
The force has already been fined £750,000 by the Information Commissioner over the 2023 breach, which saw hidden data on a spreadsheet sent out as part of a freedom of information request reveal the surnames, initials, ranks and roles of all 9,483 PSNI officers and staff. The police later said they were working on the assumption the file is in the hands of dissident republicans.
An estimated bill said the workforce could be awarded over £100m in compensation – but this week, the PSNI told a court hearing they don’t have the money to pay it.
Now a body that represents the force’s rank and file says officers are “being left high and dry” after the incident, with the Chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, Liam Kelly, pointing out that the Department of Justice and the Department of Finance had approved a move to make a “universal offer” of compensation to staff.
“The PSNI is unable to make the offer as the total figure is not affordable within current funding,” he said. “This is a total mess.
“The cupboard is bare and without direct intervention from the government, the thousands of officers who were victims in this case are being left high and dry.
“A mechanism must be found to pay what is approved. Our officers will see this latest development as a serious setback and will feel dismayed and angry. They are being treated shoddily and that is something that has to change.
“The departments of Justice and Finance and the PSNI are in agreement, but in a late admission in the High Court [the force] said it couldn’t foot the bill.
“There is now an urgent need for our devolved executive to go to the government for help. We too have serious questions to ask and will be seeking a meeting with the Secretary of State as a matter of urgency. We must have clarification and certainty.”
Without intervention from the top, Mr Kelly said, the force will be stuck “in a cash crisis, unable to meet its financial obligations to the men and women I represent”.
It’s understood chief constable Jon Boutcher met Justice Minister Naomi Long to discuss the issue this week.
The breach occurred in August 2023, in a response to a freedom of information request asking the PSNI for the number of its officers at each rank and grade, as well as how many were permanent, acting or temporary.
To fulfil the request, a spreadsheet containing all details of staff was downloaded from the police’s human resources section, and several other worksheets created in order to put together an edited version of the information – but when the final approved response was sent out, a hidden version of the original spreadsheet was accidentally included.
That was updated to the website What Do They Know, which compiles freedom of information responses from across the UK, and was publicly available for a couple of hours before the mistake was noticed and the file deleted.
The Information Commissioner blamed the breach on “a lack of simple internal administration procedures”.