Fear and mystery surround Data Protection Act

The Data Protection Act is arguably the least understood law in force, and hence one that people are terrified of.

Unlike the speed limit, which many ignore, most people are strangely desperate to obey the Data Protection Act even though they have only a faint idea how it applies to personal, commercial and time-related data. This is despite the comparatively few prosecutions that have been brought under it.

Nothing in the Data Protection Act requires police to destroy data about old offences or allegations. If anything, Humberside police should have kept what they knew about Ian Huntley, under whatever alias, for an indefinite period, experts said yesterday.

The core idea of the Act is to protect us, as individuals, from having our personal data collected and used willy-nilly by corporations and other individuals. It also gives us some limited protection from being eternally overseen by the Government, although the Government does have get-outs, such as data gathered for the purposes of preventing a criminal offence or collecting taxes.

It doesn't, although some companies think it does, prevent you giving out the names of company directors, telephone numbers or addresses. In fact, data about a company isn't covered by the Act. Only individuals are protected.

The Act contains nine "principles", of which the fifth is that data must "not be kept for longer than is necessary" for the purpose for which it was collected. Humberside police took that to mean that once an investigation into an allegation against Ian Nixon, as Huntley then called himself, had been completed and no conviction followed, they should destroy the data.

But Eduardo Ustaran, a partner at the City law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner, said: "Using the Data Protection Act as an argument to justify the deletion of Huntley's data is patently wrong. If I understand the police's role, it's the prevention and detection of crime, and the apprehension of offenders. So the Data Protection Act won't stop them keeping data."

The police are coming to realise that they need to be less scared of the Act. There is no uniform implementation of the Act across police forces - a problem that arguably led to the girls' deaths in Soham. The decision on what to disclose remains with the chief constable of each individual force.

More information is better than less; and the more you have, the more quickly good data drives out the bad. Police were not drowning in data. Quite the opposite.