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Flagship Group Data Breach Compensation Claims Guide – How Much Compensation Can I Claim? – Amounts For Flagship Group Data Breach

How Much Could You Claim For The Flagship Group Data Breach?

Welcome to our guide on what could happen following a Flagship Group data breach.

Flagship Group is a not-for-profit organisation that provides social housing across the East of England. It’s based in the city of Norfolk. Unfortunately, in November 2020, it fell victim to a cyberattack. As a result, customers and employees had their personal data compromised.

Flagship Group Data Breach

You may be eligible to claim compensation if you were affected by a data breach—provided you can prove you suffered financially or psychologically.

Legal Expert could help you. We can connect you with a skilled data breach lawyer. Your solicitor will try to make sure that you receive the maximum amount of compensation for a GDPR data breach that you deserve.

To find out more, call us today on 0800 073 8804. Otherwise, use our online claims form to reach us today.

Select A Section

  1. A Guide To Claiming Compensation For The Flagship Group Data Breach
  2. What Is A Flagship Group Data Breach?
  3. Data Protection Compliance For Housing Associations
  4. What Happened In The Flagship Group Data Breach?
  5. How The Information Commissioner’s Office Could Help You
  6. What Amount Of Compensation Could I Be Awarded?
  7. Calculating Data Protection Compensation Claims
  8. What Can I Do If My Data Is Breached?
  9. How To Get Help If Impacted By The Flagship Housing Cyber Attack
  10. No Win No Fee Claims For Data Breaches By Flagship Group
  11. Talk To Our Expert Team
  12. Data Breach Claim Resources
  13. Cyber Security Statistics
  14. Cyber Security FAQs

A Guide To Claiming Compensation For The Flagship Group Data Breach

It is not unusual for businesses and organisations to collect, process, and store data from customers or employees as part of their operational activities. For example, a social housing provider may collect personal data from people who have a relationship with the business, such as tenants.

Businesses and organisations that decide why and how they use personal data are called data controllers. As data controllers, they should abide by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is to protect the privacy and rights of individuals whose data has been collected (data subjects).

The GDPR was enacted into UK law via the Data Protection Act 2018. These are some of the core tenets:

  • Firstly, businesses must safeguard the personal data they collect. They could, for example, have cybersecurity systems set up and could train staff on effective data management.
  • Secondly, if a data breach takes place, the data subjects who have suffered could claim compensation. (The claim for GDPR data breach compensation can be settled out of court.)

In this data breach claims guide, we will explain how you could seek compensation if you can prove you suffered psychiatric damage or financial loss because of a data breach. Additionally, we will look at what causes data breaches to happen. And we will advise you on what you could do if you were affected by the Flagship housing cyber attack.

Have you suffered financial loss or psychological harm because of a housing association data breach? Then please don’t hesitate to contact Legal Expert. If you can prove that you are owed compensation for a data breach, we will connect you with a skilled data breach lawyer to start work on your claim right away.

UK Data Breach Time Limits

There is a time limit for claiming compensation for a data breach. The time limit is six years from the date you gained knowledge of the data breach. If the data breach involved a violation of the claimant’s human rights, the time limit is one year.

You can call us at no charge to understand the time limits surrounding your claim, and to avoid falling outside of them.

What Is A Flagship Group Data Breach?

Personal data breaches begin with a breach of security. As a consequence, data can become lost, destroyed, altered, disclosed or accessed without authorisation or unlawfully. Moreover, data breaches can be accidental or deliberate.

Data breaches can involve physical data (held on paper records, for example) or digital data.

A data breach at a social housing association can happen due to human error. For example, an employee may send an email to a group of tenants and accidentally attach a file containing confidential employee personal data. If the tenants access the data, a data breach would have taken place.

Data breaches at social housing organisations may also occur because of malicious activity. For example, criminals may be able to hack a housing group’s computer security system.

We will look at further examples of how a breach of data protection can happen later in this guide.

What Impact Can Housing Data Breaches Have?

Data breaches can be upsetting for those involved. Data subjects may suffer psychological injuries such as anxiety or emotional distress due to the knowledge that their data has been involved in a breach and potentially exploited.

Sadly, criminals may use stolen personal data to commit identity theft and defraud individuals. Or they may access bank details and steal money from data breach victims.

Luckily, if you have evidence that you have suffered financially or psychologically, you could claim compensation.

Housing associations could hold personal data such as:

  • Names
  • Dates of birth
  • Home addresses
  • Contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers
  • Special category data such as religion, sexual orientation, disability, nationality, or ethnicity.

If you have evidence of a valid claim, call Legal Expert today for your free consultation. We could connect you with a data breach solicitor to work on your claim.

Data Protection Compliance For Housing Associations

As we have already mentioned, businesses and organisations that operate in the UK and EU should comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if they process data. This is EU legislation. The Data Protection Act 2018 enacted the GDPR into UK law.

First, let’s look at some definitions of figures involved in data processing:

  • If an organisation collects personal data from an individual, this person is referred to as the data subject.
  • The data controller is an organisation (such as a housing association) that decides how and why they’ll process data subjects’ information.
  • In addition, there can be a data processor, which can be an external agency. The data controller can hire a data processor to process and store data on their behalf, though they don’t have to do this. They may do it if they have a lot of data to process, for example.

Data protection compliance for housing associations involves the following:

  • Firstly, data controllers should ask permission to collect a data subject’s personal data.
  • Secondly, they should inform data subjects of why they are collecting their personal data.

Your personal data should not be used for any purpose other than the one you’ve been advised of. Moreover, the organisation should keep the personal data that it has collected up to date. And finally, applicable data protection regulations and laws should be followed.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has the power to give out fines if an organisation causes a data breach.

What Happened In The Flagship Group Data Breach?

As we have mentioned, Flagship Group is a social housing company. They own over 31,000 properties in East England which they rent to tenants. They employ over 1,200 people. Unfortunately, a data breach took place on 1 November 2020.

What happened? The Flagship housing cyber attack was thought to be a ransomware attack or phishing attack. Consequently, some data was encrypted and tenant and employee data was compromised. The Flagship group ransomware attack also took most of the housing association’s computer systems offline.

Later, they confirmed that the hackers did not steal any staff or employee data. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), National Cyber Security Centre, and the Regulator of Social Housing were informed of the data protection breach.

How Data Breaches Could Affect Housing Associations

Sometimes a human error is the cause of a housing association data breach. For example, a receptionist may leave a file containing personal data on a public-facing desk. This means that unauthorised persons could be able to access the personal information.

Similarly, an employee sending a letter that contains personal data to the wrong tenant could be a breach of data protection. This is because the recipient should not have been able to access the data.

If housing associations invest in training employees to handle data correctly, it could reduce the risk of these sorts of data breaches taking place.

On the other hand, people can intentionally cause data breaches. For example, cybercriminals may hack into a computer system. They may do so to steal the personal data, or to hold the data for ransom.

You may be eligible to claim compensation if you can prove you have suffered mentally or financially because of a data breach at a housing association. Call Legal Expert if you have a valid claim.

How The Information Commissioner’s Office Could Help You

If a data breach takes place, the Information Commissioner’s Office can impose a data protection fine on the organisation and take other enforcement actions.

What should you do if you were affected by a data breach?

The ICO recommends you first write to the organisation to complain formally. if you are not satisfied with the response you receive, you can report the organisation to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

We recommend you do so within three months of the housing association’s final response about the data breach. This is because any undue delays can affect the ICO’s decisions on what steps to take.

What Amount Of Compensation Could I Be Awarded?

If your Flagship Group data breach compensation claim has a successful outcome, you could receive two heads of claim. These are as follows:

Material Damages

Material damages are compensation to reimburse you, the claimant, for any financial losses incurred because of a data breach. For example, if you lost money due to theft caused by a data breach, you could claim back these losses.

Non-Material Damages

You could be compensated if you have suffered any emotional distress or psychological harm because of the data breach. In some cases, as a result of having their privacy violated, the claimant may suffer psychological injuries. These could include depression or anxiety. With the help of a medical report, a data breach payout could include compensation for this kind of suffering.

Calculating Data Protection Compensation Claims

The case of Vidal-Hall and others vs Google Inc [2015] was important for how data breach compensation is awarded. This is for two reasons:

  1. The Court of Appeal held that you could claim data breach compensation if you’d suffered psychologically but not financially. (Before this, a claimant could only seek compensation for psychological damage if they’d also suffered financial loss.)
  2. The Court held that compensation for psychological harm that a data breach causes could be valued as it is for personal injury claims.

You can use the compensation table below to estimate how much your GDPR data breach compensation for psychological injury could be worth. The table does not include material damages.

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Psychological Injury Degree Of Injury Description Estimated Settlement
Psychiatric Damage Severe The claimant will have a marked and severe issue in coping with life, education, work and relationships. £51,460 – £108,620
Psychiatric Damage Moderately severe The claimant will have similar severe issues as highlighted above. The outlook will be better. £17,900 – £51,460
Psychiatric Damage Moderate The claimant will have problems with everyday activities such as education, work, relationships and other parts of life. They should already have made a degree of recovery. £5,500 – £17,900
Psychiatric Damage Less Severe Settlements take account of the severity of the disability and the length of time it lasted. Up to £5,500
PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Severe The claimant will have permanent PTSD symptoms and effects. £56,180 – £94,470
PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Moderately Severe Not as severe as the above category, but the claimant may still suffer some disability in the future. £21,730 – £56,180
PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Moderate Claimants will have recovered to a degree but could be left with some symptoms. £7,680 to £21,730
PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Less Severe Recovery will happen in a year or two. Up to £7,680

How did we come up with these figures?

The data breach compensation amounts in the table above are based on figures from the Judicial College Guidelines. These are personal injury claim guidelines that advise what compensation amounts could be awarded for injuries including those that are psychological. Data breach compensation payouts are comparable to these.

If you’re unsure as to how your condition could be valued, get in touch. Our advisors offer free estimates and are available 24/7.

What Can I Do If My Data Is Breached?

If you can prove you suffered psychologically or financially because of a housing association data breach, what can you do? We recommend that you write to the association to complain formally.

In your letter or email, explain the effect that the data breach has had on you. If you do not receive a satisfactory response, you could pursue compensation for a data breach.

How To Get Help If Impacted By The Flagship Housing Cyber Attack

Would you like a data protection lawyer to handle your data breach claim? Legal Expert can help. There are many advantages to working with Legal Expert.

  • Firstly, our knowledgeable solicitors have decades of experience.
  • Secondly, they will try to negotiate with the defendant to make sure you get the highest amount of compensation you deserve.
  • And finally, if your claim is accepted, our solicitors would offer their services on a No Win No Fee basis.

Read our online solicitor reviews today, to see for yourself how satisfied our previous clients are with our service.

If you can evidence that you suffered mentally or lost out financially due to a Flagship Group data breach, you may be considering claiming. Get in touch with our advisors if you have evidence of a valid claim.

No Win No Fee Claims For Data Breaches by Flagship Group

If you trust Legal Expert to handle your compensation claim, our solicitors can do so on a No Win No Fee basis. This means that our solicitors will take on your data breach claim without charging you your solicitor’s fee upfront.

Additionally, they would only charge you a success fee if your claim wins. You would sign a Conditional Fee Agreement (the formal term for No Win No Fee agreement) to formalise this.

Another advantage of No Win No Fee claims is that, for many, it is a more affordable way to use the services of a solicitor. This is because if your claim isn’t successful, you wouldn’t have to pay the solicitor’s fee.

Read our online No Win No Fee claims guide today to find out more.

Talk To Our Expert Team

If you can prove you have lost out financially or suffered mental harm because of a data breach, contact Legal Expert today.

  • Call our compensation claims helpline on 0800 073 8804
  • Contact us in writing about your claim.
  • Use the chatbox in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen to chat with an advisor.

Data Breach Claim Resources

External Guides

A government data protection guide

An ICO protection of data guide

Make a complaint to the ICO about a data breach.

Cyber Security Statistics

data-breach-statistics-graph

These statistics can be found in this government Cyber Security Breaches Survey. As you can see, 11% of businesses that were affected by data breaches between March 2019 and March 2020 suffered attacks where others impersonated the organisation. Only 2% were affected by ransomware.

Cyber Security FAQs

What are the basics of cybersecurity?

Basic cybersecurity concepts include: protecting data, identifying threats, detecting hacking attacks and responding to them. Businesses or organisations should have a cybersecurity system to protect their personal data.

Cybersecurity can also involve businesses and organisations giving their staff training. Staff can be educated to understand online security and the danger of phishing attacks.

What questions should I ask about cybersecurity?

When drawing up a cybersecurity strategy, organisations should ask the following questions:

  1. What can our organisation do to prevent cyber attacks?
  2. Do we test our incident response plans regularly?
  3. How do you handle cybersecurity risks posed by third parties?
  4. Is your organisation at risk of a cyberattack? Are you adequately protected from cyberattacks?

Thanks for reading our guide on what to do following a Flagship Group data breach.

Written by Chelache

Edited By Victorine