Fines levied by the Information Commissioner’s Office were “unfair and unreasonable”, a charities lawyer told a conference on fundraising and data protection yesterday.
Lawrence Simanowitz, a partner at law firm Bates Wells Braithwaite, said that he had made a series of requests to the ICO under the Freedom of Information Act, about the basis on which it fined 13 large charities for breaches of data protection law.
In part those fines were based on what ICO said donors’ “reasonable expectations” might be about a process where charities researched their data to assess whether they would like to make a gift.
Simanowitz, speaking at the Westminster Social Policy Forum keynote seminar on charity fundraising in London, suggested the decisions about reasonable expectations appeared to be the personal opinions of individuals in the ICO.
“The ICO has said that profiling, if you don’t have consent, is likely to be unlawful,” he said. “I don’t think that’s right. They don’t seem to have got that from anywhere.”
The ICO, when contacted for comment, referred Civil Society News to a previous speech by the information commissioner, who said in February that wealth screening was "not fair".
"Let me be clear," she said at the time. "It’s not that the activity is against the law but failing to properly and clearly tell your donors that you’re going to do it, is.”
‘Jury still out on Fundraising Regulator’
Simanowitz also said the jury “is still out” on whether the Fundraising Regulator would deliver its objectives successfully.
He praised some elements of the regulator’s behaviour, but said that it had not behaved helpfully in the wake of the ICO fines, particularly Lord Michael Grade, the chair.
He said the regulator had not listened to the sector enough “at the outset”. He also said it “treated the sector as if it was guilty and kind of believed the media myths that the problems in fundraising were greater than they actually were”.
Sector ‘cannot be complacent’
Simanowitz also criticised fundraisers themselves for not monitoring professional firms closely enough, and not recognising that “some of them were cowboys”. And he said that boards had not been closely enough engaged in the oversight of fundraising.
“It’s now being taken more seriously,” he said. “But still maybe not seriously enough.”
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