The First-tier Tribunal has upheld the Information Commissioner’s decision to impose a monetary penalty on Basildon Borough Council for publishing sensitive personal information about a family in planning application documents that were made publicly available online. 

However, the FTT halved the penalty from £150,000 to £75,000, saying the ICO had not given sufficient weight to certain points in mitigation and not taken into account others.

The Tribunal noted that, unlike fines imposed in the criminal justice system, there was no independent body such as the Sentencing Council providing a definitive list of relevant aggravating and mitigating factors and a matrix of appropriate fines. It also noted that the Information Commissioner was seeking to establish her own ‘database’ of penalties and pertinent factors to be taken into account and this was referred to in the Decision Record, “though it might be argued that that it is not entirely appropriate for the investigator and enforcer of MPNs to be the body that also effectively sets the level of the penalties”.