Police take 500,000 off vulnerable persons file
NEARLY 500,000 records have been deleted from a police database of vulnerable people after a data protection row.
Officers can add people they consider to be at risk of future harm to this list.
But three years ago Police Scotland fell foul of the Information Commissioner, who said there needed to be a policy for removing names from the database.
It has now emerged that 494,039 records have been removed.
Concerns about the Vulnerable Person Database (VPD) included some people not being told that they had been added.
The force said the database helps ‘maximise opportunities to provide early intervention, prevention and to reduce harm’.
It added that the VPD, which now has about 267,000 people on it, has new records and incidents added and removed ‘every hour of every day’.
But Matthew Rice, Scotland director of the Open Rights Group, said: ‘This confirms what we’d been concerned about since we learned of the VPD – that hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland had their personal data added to a database and shared with public bodies without their consent, for no good reason. This
Police should have done this sooner
deletion exercise is a welcome development. Police Scotland should have done this sooner, it cannot be a one-off.’
The VPD aims to help prevent tragedies such as that of 11-week-old Caleb Ness, who was killed by his father in 2001. Authorities failed to communicate information about his wellbeing.
The list involves collating disparate pieces of information about a particular vulnerable individual into a single file.
This can be shared with other public bodies, such as social work departments.
Because the VPD was set up as an interim measure with the new Police Scotland in 2013, the force had no policy for removing data when no longer applicable. The Information Commissioner said this breached the Data Protection Act.
Chief Inspector James Davenport said the VPD aimed to ‘reduce harm’, adding: ‘Police Scotland implemented a solution for the weeding and retention of records to ensure and safeguard the appropriate handling of personal information.’