Labour has been accused of ‘targeting’ a body representing private schools with a ‘lawfare’ campaign which has cost the group thousands of pounds in legal and other fees.
Sir Keir Starmer‘s party bombarded the Independent Schools Council (ISC) with multiple legal requests for data, some of which has been given to media outlets in a seeming bid to embarrass it.
It comes as Labour plans to charge private schools 20 per cent VAT and scrap their 80 per cent relief on business rates – after a policy U-turn in which it originally wanted to abolish the schools’ charitable status.
The ISC has questioned whether the subject access requests sent to them by Labour education spokesman Bridget Phillipson and her aides were intended to ‘silence’ it.
It represents more than 1,300 private schools and is one of the leading bodies campaigning against Labour’s VAT policy.
Labour plans to charge private schools 20 per cent VAT and scrap their 80 per cent relief on business rates
Tory MPs called the tactics ‘sinister’ and leading figures in the sector likened Labour’s demands for data to ‘lawfare’ where high-powered organisations use the law to intimidate critics, the Sunday Telegraph reports.
Under GDPR rules, people have the right to ask an organisation what information it holds about them by submitting a subject access request (SAR).
In less than a year, the Labour MP and her team have made five separate SARs to the ISC – three for data on Ms Phillipson made in December, March and last Tuesday and two of her aides asked for their data in April.
The ISC, which has a small team of 13 full-time staff, has had to fork out ‘many thousands of pounds’ to comply with the requests, as they have had to hire IT specialists to handle the data and lawyers to work out what information can be given over.
An email sent by one of Ms Phillipson’s team, but signed by her, asked for ‘all submissions, emails, records of meetings and phone conversations, text messages, social messaging app messages, and other internal or external papers and correspondence in which I have been referenced… either by my full name, my surname, my initials, or by my official titles as Shadow secretary of state for education, or MP for Houghton and Sunderland South’.
The correspondence went on to highlight that ‘it is an offence under the Data Protection Act to withhold, delete or destroy information relevant to this request’.
Labour later gave some of the information it received to the Guardian. In June the paper ran an article about an ISC employee warning a colleague, before a media appearance with Ms Phillipson, that she ‘gets very chippy when people don’t agree with her or push back at her’.
Bridget Phillipson and her aides have sent multiple requests for data to the Independent Schools Council
The ISC said the SARs are affecting its operation, adding in a statement: ‘In every case, ISC complied with the request, sent all information that fell under the scope and did so within the Information Commissioner’s Office’s recommended guidelines. The cost of complying with these SARs has run to many thousands of pounds.’
It warned the passing of the information to media outlets has ‘led to concern about how future SAR disclosures would be used’.
ISC boss Julie Robinson said: ‘It is worrying to think that any political party would use legislation designed to protect people to… try to silence its critics.’
Tom Hunt, the Tory MP for Ipswich, said Labour’s requests to the ISC had the ‘whiff’ of bullying, and that there is ‘something rather sinister about it’.
An aide for Ms Phillipson declined to comment. A Labour source said: ‘The ISC have said in one breath they want to work with Labour but seek to attack Bridget Phillipson in another.’
Sir Anthony Seldon, head of Epsom College, told the Mail: ‘Labour need to be building partnerships between the state and independent sectors – not waging a pointless war on the independent sector.’
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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