THE Conservative Party broke the law by collecting ethnicity data about 10 million voters, the Information Commissioner has confirmed.
A report published by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in November revealed that, ahead of the 2019 General Election, the Tories purchased data sets that guessed a person’s country of origin, race and religion based on their name.
This was applied to the records of 10 million voters.
After his party was accused of racial profiling, Data Minister John Whittingdale claimed in December that the ICO had not deemed the collection to be illegal.
However, ICO chief Elizabeth Denham has now contradicted him while speaking to the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
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Responding to a question from SNP MP John Nicolson she said: “Religion and ethnicity are both, like health information, special category data that require a higher standard for a legal basis to collect.
"Ethnicity is not an acceptable collection of data. There isn’t a legal basis that allows for the collection of that data.”
Pressed by Nicolson to confirm whether or not the Conservative Party’s collection of data was illegal, Denham replied that the ICO told the Tories to destroy the data because “they didn’t have the legal basis to collect it”.
She confirmed: “It was illegal to collect the ethnicity data."
Whittingdale, asked by Nicolson about the revelations in the Commons last month, stated: “As I recall, the Information Commissioner examined the practices of all political parties and made comments against all of them. However, it did not find that any breaches of the law had occurred.”
Nicolson is now demanding clarity from the Tory minister.
He commented: “The ethnic and religious profiling of voters by the Conservative Party was always morally and ethically abhorrent. We now know from the Information Commissioner that it was also illegal.
“Conservative Minister, John Whittingdale, told me on the floor of the Commons that his party had not broken the law. That is wrong. I will be writing to him to ask that he withdraw his false claim, acknowledge that the Tories’ ethnic profiling was illegal, and undertake not to break the law again.”
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Jim Killock, executive director of campaigning organisation Open Rights Group, added: “The Conservative Party’s racial profiling of voters was illegal.
"Elizabeth Denham finally confirmed the unlawful nature of this profiling by the Conservative Party under pressure from MP’s on the DCMS committee.
“Yet the ICO still has not explained what parties can and cannot do. Mass profiling of voters continues, even if this data has been removed. The ICO needs to act stop unlawful profiling practices. That’s their job.”
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