Conservative Party ‘acted illegally’ in collecting voter ethnicity data

The Conservative Party’s collection of the personal data of 10 million voters around their ethnicity and religion was illegal, the Information Commissioner has told MPS.

Elizabeth Denham said the Conservatives had deleted the data following a recommendation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in a report last year.

Speaking to MPS on the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport sub-committee on online harms and disinformation, Ms Denham said it was unacceptable that the party had used people’s names to attempt to derive their ethnicity and religion.

She said: “In our audit work, where we looked at the practices of all political parties, our recommendation was for any kind of ethnicity data to be deleted and the Conservative Party – I’m told and we have evidence that the Conservative Party have destroyed or deleted that information.”

Ms Denham said the party had done this voluntarily, but it would have ordered it to destroy the data if it had not agreed to do so.

Pressed on the issue by SNP MP John Nicolson, Ms Denham said: “Religion and ethnicity are both – like health information – special category data that requires a higher standard for a legal basis to collect.

“So again, ethnicity is not an acceptable collection of data, there isn’t a legal basis that allows for the collection of that data.”

Asked to confirm if it was indeed illegal, the Information Commissioner said: “It was illegal to collect the ethnicity data and that has been destroyed.”

Privacy campaigners responding to Ms Denham’s evidence said the ICO needed to do more to enforce rules around how political parties collect data on voters.

Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group, said: “The Conservative Party’s racial profiling of voters was illegal.

“Yet the ICO still has not explained what parties can and cannot do.

“The ICO needs to act to stop unlawful profiling practices.”

Elizabeth Denham.