Persistent Communicator identified by council and their privacy breached

Question

The council has punished a local resident for their insistence on obtaining answers to their questions, some of which form the basis of formal complaints to the council, by stating that they are have the ‘characteristics of a persistent communicator’ and have labelled them as such, limiting their contact to via letter, and only to the clerk. The council’s policy states that they will notify the town’s district councillors for reasons which are not clear. And they have done this. Is this not a breach of privacy and GDPR? Surely, if the council want to do something so ridiculous, that is kind of up to them, but to start bandying it around and not just keep it to themselves starts to smack of discrimination, libel and/or defamation. Has anyone any experience of members of the public going down a legal route with this please?

Answer 1

Not at all uncommon for a poorly led (weak or ill informed chair) or inappropriately advised PC (clerk providing poor service) to take such action.

Whilst a PC may create, endorse and invoke whatever "policy" they see fit (provided it is lawful) what they often fail to grasp is that a PC policy cannot be overtly imposed upon or used to restrict the lawful activities of a member of the public.  The member of public is not obliged to even acknowledge the PC "policy."

In your example - the PC invokes a policy which requires a named individual to communicate only in writing (presume this includes email) and to only address such to a specified person.

This cannot be enforced since the individual has statutory rights to seek information and is at liberty, by dint of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, to submit appropriate FoI / EIR / SAR requests to ANY Cllr or member of staff associated with the PC - ergo, the PC "policy" is superseded by statute.

Agree, bandying such arrangements around in the public domain could be subject to action under GDPR and / or defamation although the latter is very seldom used due to costs.

If only a PC would expend as much energy trying to meaningfully satisfy a valid question rather than seeking to debar an interested party from submitting questions the whole system would be much better for all.