Background

Mr Matthew McConville, the Head of our specialised Data Breach Department at Irvings Law has successfully represented a client in a data breach compensation claim against a housing association. The identity of the parties are anonymised but Mr McConville’s client will be named as ‘Mr P’ and the housing association as ‘H’ for the purposes of this blog.

Mr P is a tenant of H but H erroneously forwarded Mr P’s name, email address, postal address and subject of a previous email he had sent to another tenant of H’s. When realising this error, H apologised and to avoid such an incident reoccurring, they set up standard email templates to ensure that this incident does not happen again to anyone else. H also offered Mr P £100.00 in compensation.

Representation

Unhappy with this, Mr P approached Mr McConville for specialist advice and without hesitation no win, no fee terms were offered. Once instructed, Mr McConville lodged a formal Letter of Claim to H as clearly, they had disclosed Mr P’s information without the appropriate consent which they acknowledged, apologised for and made changes in their practices. Mr McConville alleged that H had breached / invaded Mr P’s privacy under the Human Rights Act, had breached the Data Protection Act 2018/the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as confidence following their misuse of private information pertaining to Mr P.

Resolution

Upon receipt of this, thankfully H wanted to settle the matter and wished to further engage in settlement discussions. After tough negotiation from Mr McConville on behalf of Mr P, settlement of £750.00 plus legal costs was reached without Court proceedings needing to be issued or served.