Councils among top five offenders for data breaches

Local authorities are one of the top offenders for data breaches across the UK, a new analysis has revealed.
UK data breach solicitors, Hayes Connor, have analysed the ICO’s ongoing data security report to uncover the industries most affected by data breaches.

The findings, which revealed the sectors with the highest percentage of data breaches since 2019, found that local government, finance, insurance & credit, and retail & manufacture were joint third with 9%.

Health was first with 19% and education & childcare was second with 14%.

Together local government, finance, insurance & credit, and retail & manufacture make up just under one in 10 cases. This amounts to around 2,929 data breaches within each of the third place sectors, out of the total 32,541 data breaches since 2019.

In the local government sector, it’s taking over 72 hours to report 47% of their data breaches, which is against ICO regulations and is leaving councils vulnerable to large fines, warns Hayes Connor.

Christine Sabino, legal director at Hayes Connor, said: ‘What’s concerning is the public puts a lot of trust in industries such as the health, government, and education sectors, with the expectation that their data is going to be handled securely. With so many of these data breaches being caused by human error, it’s very clear that these industries are in dire need of data handling training, at the very least.’