Cumbria Police staff data breach a 'one-off'

PCC Peter McCall said lessons had been learnt

A police and crime commissioner (PCC) has said a force data breach was a "one-off".

The names and the salaries of every Cumbria Police officer and staff member were accidentally published online in March.

PCC Peter McCall told Westmorland and Furness Council's police, fire and crime panel that lessons had been learned from the incident.

He said there had been "no risk to individual personnel".

In August, when the breach became publicly known, the force blamed "human error" which led to the information being wrongly uploaded to its website.

'Should not happen again'

Cumbria Police said at the time the impact had been "low", but it had reported the breach to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) as per normal procedure and removed the information immediately.

"The ICO were satisfied with the actions the constabulary had taken and the robust steps which were put in place to prevent any further data breaches," the force said.

Mr McCall told councillors the individuals affected had been spoken to and given reassurance, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

"Assurance was given, and indeed accepted, that the breach was only a one-off incident and learning from it has been taken onboard and processes put in place to ensure it should not happen again," he said.

"I would reassure the panel that there was no risk to individual personnel as a result of that breach."

In the same week as the Cumbria error, an "industrial-scale breach of data" was revealed in Northern Ireland.

Information about 10,000 PSNI officers and staff were published online for a number of hours.

A few days later details emerged of another PSNI breach with the theft of documents and a laptop from a car in Newtownabbey in July.