The UK Post office has launched an “urgent” investigation and notified the UK’s data watchdog after the names and addresses of hundreds of post office operators were mistakenly published on its website.
The state-run agency made public the personal details of 555 people who sued the post office in a case filed in the high court in 2019, paving the way for convicted post office operators to be acquitted by the court.
The case was led by activist Sir Alan Bates, played by actor Toby Jones in the hit ITV drama Mr Bates v Post Office, whose fight for justice was depicted in the show and sparked public outrage over this year’s Horizon IT scandal.
Since being alerted to this incident, First reported According to the Daily Mail, the post office has removed the documents containing personal information from its website and notified the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The case has outraged postal workers, some of whom are still waiting for compensation. Many have had their lives ruined, faced bankruptcy, prison time and homelessness after being wrongly charged with theft and false accounting in what MPs have described as the worst miscarriage of justice in the history of the British justice system.
legislation The bill, introduced before the general election, would have quashed convictions of operators prosecuted between September 1996 and December 2018.
The Post Office said: “The document in question has been removed from our website and we are investigating as a matter of urgent priority how this document was made public. We are in the process of notifying the Information Commissioner’s Office of this incident in accordance with regulatory requirements.”
The ICO said: “We have not received any reports of data breaches in this regard. Organisations are required to notify the ICO within 72 hours of becoming aware of a personal data breach unless it poses a risk to people’s rights and freedoms.”
“If an organisation decides that a breach did not need to be reported, it should keep its own records of it and be able to explain why it did not report it, if necessary.”
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The ICO can impose fines for the most serious cases of data breaches in the public sector, as well as issue warnings, reprimands and enforcement notices.
In 2021, the ICO fined the Cabinet Office £500,000 after the addresses of 2020 New Year Honours recipients were published online. The ICO also fined British Airways £20 million after customer data was hacked in 2018.
