A missing horse investigation is scuppered by the Data Protection Act
27 Oct 2010
On April 6th 2008 John Myles went to check his horses only to find that two were missing and they’ve not been seen since.
When John saw that his pair of driving horses were not in their stables he assumed they had been taken for an early ride.
"I went to the stable block at 9am that morning to check all the horses as usual. Max and Major weren’t in their stables so I presumed the girls had taken them for a ride," explains John.
"I don’t know what made me look but as I turned to head back to the house I looked up at the security cameras and they were pointing up to the sky."
Immediately John knew something was wrong and ran back to the house to call the girls.
"Max and Major hadn’t been taken for a ride so I checked the camera footage straight away. At 10.29pm I saw the camera views change, so I called the police."
After reporting his missing horses John went back to the stable block and noticed that one of the stable doors had been broken off its hinges.
"One of the doors was difficult to open so they’d had to break it off, but that wasn’t the most unusual thing I noticed," says John.
Of all eight horses on the yard Max and Major, a driving pair, had been taken for the middle stables leaving a number of other horses untouched.
"My gut feeling is that someone knew these horses - what makes me even more certain is that one of them could only be led in a chifney and a chifney had been taken that night too."
John contacted ports around the UK to ask whether any horses had passed through in the night. On speaking with an official at Pembroke Port he discovered that a number of horses had been brought in the early hours by a haulier.
"I asked for the name of the haulier company the horses were travelling with but I was told he couldn’t give me that information due to data protection. I also asked if he checked the passports against the horses on the lorry and was told that this wasn’t done regularly – normally they just counted the heads on the lorry and that was that," John explains.
John was visited by the police at 7pm that evening, but since the morning he found Max and Major’s empty stables there has been no news regarding their whereabouts.
Heledd Lloyd-Jones, an Associate who leads the Information Governance team at Morgan Cole, comments on the above story:
The Data Protection Act protects information relating to "living individuals" but what is often overlooked is that this protection extends to unincorporated businesses, that is sole traders or simple partnerships. Information about such businesses is effectively information regarding the individual business people concerned. This is illustrated by an early FOIA case concerning a request to Defra for a list of all registered UK egg manufacturers. The ICO's finding was that the names of corporate manufacturers has to be disclosed but that the names of sole traders were exempt from disclosure because disclosure would amount to the disclosure of personal data and would breach rights protected under the Data Protection Act. The Information Tribunal in subsequent cases has questioned whether the DPA should be used to protect information about small businesses but the point has not been the subject of any formal ruling by the Tribunal. In some overseas jurisdictions, data protection law extends as a matter of course to corporate as well as to personal information; the fact that the UK DPA applies to some, but not all businesses is an inevitable source of confusion.
The response of Pembroke Docks to a request for information concerning the name of a haulier transporting horses to Ireland on the night that Mr Myles horses went missing may well reflect an appreciation of the extent to which the DPA applies to unincorporated businesses. However it is worth noting that the DPA does permit personal data to be disclosed where this is necessary "for the purpose of obtaining legal advice or is otherwise necessary for the purpose of establishing, exercising or defending legal rights." Accordingly, even if information concerning the identity of the haulier did amount to personal data, there may have been some scope for disclosing this information to Mr Myles without breach of the DPA. Certainly the information could have been disclosed to the police without breach of the DPA to the extent that disclosure was necessary to prevent or detect crime.
