Plaid Cymru under investigation from Information Commissioner

The Information Commissioner for Wales has confirmed to me that she will be writing to Plaid Cymru over suggestions in a leaked memorandum from a Plaid Cymru AM concerning the voting intentions of Rhondda constituents.

The memorandum questioned whether there was any point in Plaid Cymru Assembly Members taking up their constituents’ cases. Ms Wood said that when Plaid Cymru had held the Rhondda Assembly seat form 1999-2003, only some of those whose cases had been taken up by their then Assembly Member decided to vote Plaid Cymru:

A very small proportion of those people indicated that they would be voting Plaid Cymru in telephone canvassing. This begs the question, 'is casework the best use of any AM's time'?

I wrote to the Information Commissioner last month saying that this clearly indicated either that Plaid Cymru used the casework names and addresses for telephone canvassing purposes, or they subsequently compared their telephone canvassing returns to their casework records. Either of these scenarios would be unlawful.

Anne Jones, Assistant Commissioner (Wales) has now written back saying that she was writing to Plaid Cymru to ask them to explain to me exactly who held the constituents’ information, and also the circumstances in which the telephone canvassing referred to in the memorandum took place.

I am very pleased that the Information Commissioner has now decided to act on this. Using confidential casework information for canvassing purposes would be a breach of data protection laws. My constituents want to know that their confidential information has not been abused. I look forward to the Commissioner’s investigations.