UK Government Denies Thousands of Migrants Access to Personal Data

The UK’s Home Office used the “immigration exemption” to deny over 14,000 subject access requests in 2020

The U.K.’s Home Office used the “immigration exemption” to deny people access to their personal data over 14,000 times in 2020 — to deny over 72% of subject access requests.

The subject access request is the backbone of data protection law. It lets you see who is holding your data and what they’re doing with it.

In the UK, migrants and their lawyers routinely use subject access requests to view data held by the Home Office. This data can form the basis of life-or-death deportation orders — it’s crucial that it’s correct.

When the government passed the GDPR into UK law, via the Data Protection Act 2018 it included a get-out clause. Any subject access request could be denied if complying with it would “prejudice” the “maintenance of effective immigration control”.

The government insisted this exemption would be in a proportionate way and in “relatively limited circumstances”.

We now know it’s used nearly to deny nearly three-quarters of subject access requests to the Home Office.

How could each of these 14,027 subject access requests possibly have presented a “prejudice” to the “maintenance of effective immigration control”? What does this phrase even mean?

The government has never justified its use of this overly broad exemption.

For an upcoming article, I spoke to representatives from two UK charities — Open Rights Group and the3million — who are taking the government to court over the immigration exemption.

They told me how much pain this provision is causing migrants dealing with residency and deportation issues.

There’s still a chance that their case against the government can overturn this bad law on human rights grounds.