To celebrate international Data Privacy Day 2021 (28 January 2021), the Birketts Data Protection Team has produced a series of data protection top tips articles. This bite-sized advice series is designed to provide you with some easily digestible compliance tips, focusing on some of the key issues we see clients dealing with on a daily basis. Today we are focusing on the public sector. Here are our data protection top tips…

• Training – as most data breaches come down to human error, make sure that your staff have appropriate training on how to avoid and recognise breaches.

• Do not delay – report breaches to the ICO as soon as you are able and always within 72 hours of becoming aware of the breach. Have a data breach plan in place so you can meet this requirement.

• Review your procedures for subjects access requests (SARs) – put processes in place to ensure that your staff can recognise SARs and deal with them efficiently.

• Sharing data with other public bodies – review when you are sharing data with other public bodies and put appropriate data sharing agreements in place.

• Check you data governance – are you only keeping data for as long as necessary for the purposes for which it was collected? Check that you are not retaining person data when it is no longer necessary.

If you have any queries regarding our top tips for the public sector or need help in implementing them do get in touch.

Please feel free to like and share our top tips and check back again tomorrow for our next set.

Happy Data Privacy Day from the Birketts Data Protection Team.