An individual applies for a job as a security guard The employer has had significant...

The Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) makes it a criminal offence for a person to require another person to make a subject access request for information about their health, convictions or cautions, or spent convictions, and to provide that information to the first person or a third person, as a condition of providing or offering to provide goods, facilities or services, or as a condition of entering into or continuing a contract. This is known as an enforced subject access request. The employer in this scenario is committing a criminal offence by offering the job to the individual on the condition that they request a copy of their medical record and provide it to the employer. The employer is also breaching the data protection principles of lawfulness, fairness, transparency, purpose limitation, data minimisation, and storage limitation, as they are processing health data, which is a special category of personal data, without a valid legal basis, without informing the individual of the purpose and legal basis of the processing, and without limiting the processing to what is necessary and relevant for the employment relationship. The employer should instead obtain the individual’s explicit consent to request the health information directly from the relevant health professional, and only request the information that is necessary and proportionate for the specific role of a security guard. References:

Section 184 of the DPA 20183

ICO guidance on enforced subject access requests4

ICO guidance on special category data5