Love Questions Seizure of Bank Account Details in Labour’s Database State
Cllr Rory Love has demanded that Shepway District Council puts up a fight to prevent its staff from having their bank account details seized in what he has described as “a further extension of Labour’s database state”.
Cllr Love tabled a public question on the issue at last week’s Full Council meeting. He asked the Leader of the Council, Cllr Robert Bliss, to write to the Audit Commission and to Michael Howard MP to express Shepway’s concern about the move.
In common with most employers, Shepway District Council asks for the bank account details of its staff to facilitate salary payments. However, the Government has now given powers to the Audit Commission to seize these details without the consent of the bank account owners to carry out a so-called “data-matching” exercise. The Government claim that checking whether any of the bank accounts also appear on lists held by other Government agencies could help identify fraud.
Cllr Love points to a spectacular lack of data security where the Government is involved, with discs lost, laptops left on trains, and just a fortnight ago, the loss of prison staff personnel records. At the Council meeting he explained that banks, the police, trading standards officers and Government agencies have all advised against divulging personal account details in order to guard against compromising data security.
Apart from the security concerns as these details are passed first to the Audit Commission and then to a private company for processing, he also argued that divulging such information without consent is a breach of trust.
Cllr Love said:
“Staff entrust their bank account details to their employer for one reason only; to receive salary payments. The employer should not pass those details to anyone else without the owner’s consent, unless there is a court order following reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. If they get away with this with local government employees, it will be a small step before every employer in the country is required to divulge the bank account details of every employee in the country in a further, pernicious extension of Labour’s database state.”
20th September 2008