Censoring Of Personal Information By Cyngor Gwynedd Council.

It is the end of another week and Gwynedd Council continue to remain silent in regards to the Independent Investigator's Report into our Stage 2 complaint raised in May, last year, on the advice of the Ombudsman for Wales and so I am placing the second point of our complaint on to the blog.

It involves censoring of personal information obtained under a SAR (subject access request) and a Data breach. 

Data & Information:  The complainants have been provided with an email by Gwynedd County Council which had been partially censored. They believe that there was no legitimate reason to censor the information as there were no third party information within the email, and they believe that the censored narrative was an attempt to prevent them from reading disparaging comments about them by Mel Panther to a professional in the education department.

The complainants were also given emails which contained information shared between professionals relating to other children, which was their personal information and a clear breach of data protection and confidentiality.
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The complaint says it all really and our desired outcome was -

The complainants seek an explanation for the censoring of their own information, and whether or not it is legal to do so. They seek an explanation from Melvin panther as to how he thought it in any way appropriate or professional to speak about them in such a derogatory manner to another professional working with the family.
In relation to the information containing other children’s details, they wish for this to be dealt with via the Council’s information/Data protection security policy & procedure.

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There are at least four (4) emails that have been censored by a black marker pen.

All of the censored emails were sent by Melvin Panther, a senior manager in Gwynedd Children and Family Support department.

Now I am not suggesting that Mr Panther censored his own emails, which we were the subject of, because everyone who works in the Care sector has to sign the Data Protection Act and it will have been made very clear to them at the time that altering records or other peoples information, in any way, is a criminal offence.

But someone did indeed censor our personal information, we believe, in attempt to cover up the disparaging remarks made by Melvin Panther. So who ?
I have sighted the response by the Education department to Mr Panther and I read it as a polite slap down so my thanks to that Education officer.

Melvin Panther is a Manager of the social worker, Jamie Haydon, named in the point of complaint discussed in the previous post.

The Data breach involves sending us the name(s) of children receiving support from the council and also names the school the child attends.