Tories' data protection proposals based on 10-year old figures

David Cameron's Conservatives need to update some of their figures

The figure used by the Conservative Party to estimate the annual cost to business of the Data Protection Act is almost 10 years old.

A Tory policy review published last week quotes figures from the British Chambers of Commerce Burdens Barometer, which estimates that the Act imposes a recurring annual cost of £2.3bn, and says this is the third-highest impact of all the new regulations on business legislated in the last 10 years.

But this number was taken from a Barometer published in 1998 – the same year the Act was introduced – and came originally from a government Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) the same year.

In December 2006, the former Department for Constitutional Affairs published a report that measured the costs to business of complying with the Data Protection Act and associated secondary legislation at a much lower £55.9m in recurring annual administrative costs – five times less that the RIA figure, though with an accompanying warning that this figure might not be 'statistically robust.'