Abject Failure of the ICO is beyond belief

Larry is it because we are mere commoners and Local Authorities and ICO are now our BETTERS. We must know our place?

I think the word you are looking for to describe the ICO is "Quango".
On the application form where it asks "Do you have properties elsewhere" your response should be " Refer to land registry"
"Are they licensed" your response "Please contact relevent LA"
Dont do the work for them.
In life when someone you meet is bigger than you, you don't meet them head on, you side step and, stick your foot out, a little push, and let them fall from their inertia.

I wholly agree. We are the plebs... not proper citizens with modern constitutional rights, just Crown subjects with no real civil rights. Because we can't plead a constitutional amendment as in a modern democracy, all we have is Judicial Review (which costs a fortune and the local authority will merely amend the scheme again) or we place reliance on a so-called Regulator like the ICO.
The ICO is a very poor regulator in my experience. I am actually now complaining to the ICO after months and months of waiting that the complaints system itself does not work! They have tried to help at one point but the Council will not play ball with two subject access requests (under the pre-GDPR regime) over a year late in being answered. The ICO will not prosecute them so my recourse is to sue..... as if!
The underlying problem with the ICO is that it is run by and for the self-serving benefit of the civil servants who work in it, by and large amateurs operating in a culture of complacency and failure and unlikely to last more than all of five minutes in a job elsewhere (except in local government of course!).
We need wholesale reform and empowerment of the people but the Westminster system is just too broken to deliver on that.

Agree completely with AA and Peter.
The only way is to examine the fine print. The useless councils simply cannot get it right. Where they fail to comply , we do not proceed. Such is their ignorance and arrogance that they fail to acknowledge errors and keep bullying in which case we cannot nor should we proceed with their flawed application schemes. Its so sad. They introduce licensing schemes but fail to comply legally meaning landlords dont get the benefit of these fantastic schemes.😂🤔

I currently have an appeal submitted to the Residential Property Tribunal regarding the heavy handed treatment I have received from the local council during the HMO licencing process.
In an email to the council I had asked for guidance about a fire escape route issue and instead of responding to my email they put a prohibition order put on one of my rooms which in turn put a local charge on my deeds and so my mortgage lender was informed causing them to come back to me with lots of hoops to jump through to reassure them that I am not a rogue landlord.
In my appeal I have expressed concern that the council's actions broke GDPR in that my information should have been used in a proportionate way and shared only as a last resort and I have also asked why the council needed details of properties I own in other areas of the country.
Watch this space. I'm not sure this will get me anywhere but I felt questions needed to be asked.

GDPR was brought in largely to create a framework within which the gathering, trading and subsequent use of personal data can be justified by commercial and non-commercial organizations. It's purpose is not primarily to protect the individual. Perhaps to biggest get-out for any organization is 'legitimate interest', a catch-all terms which allows an organization to use your data for virtually any purpose it wishes to provided it can justify a need for that data.

That justification can simply be for marketing purposes, as I found out earlier this year. For example, Royal Mail sells your personal details gathered via its redirection services to companies such as Experian which, in turn, sells it on to companies that request your whereabouts.

While companies have a duty to protect your personal details from hackers, they are perfectly able to pass them around and use them as they wish.

Anne Nixon, contact me at the Alliance. We have some information which should help with your appeal and which we are happy to share with you.

Reply to the comment left by Larry Sweeney at 31/03/2019 - 22:20
Could you please share it with me as I have had a nightmare experience with Salford City Council?

Off Course Peter.
Please email the Alliance and we will get it to you by return email.

Reply to the comment left by Alan Bromley at 30/03/2019 - 17:14
Totally agree. You could say the title general "data protection" regulation puts the GDPR in breach of the GDPR because it has a misleading emphasis on protection of personal data. The predominant purpose is actually to protect organisations who wish to share data which might otherwise be found to be a good old fashioned breach of confidentiatlity.
Most laypersons would automatically think their data would be kept private by any organisation who says they comply with GDPR when in fact it can be passed about extensively.