Pension Data Breach Compensation

This guide examines what your next steps should be if you are entitled to claim pension data breach compensation. All employers must offer pension schemes by law.  Organisations that offer pension schemes must abide by data protection law when handling the personal information of all members. 

This guide will begin by looking at how pension data breach compensation is calculated. You will be awarded compensation for the impact the data breach has had on your mental health and your finances if your claim is successful and we examine both. To establish if you have a legal claim, we then provide the criteria that need to be met.

We also discuss instances of how the personal information held by a pension scheme provider could be exposed due to the organisation not protecting it. Furthermore, also discussed is what evidence you will need to collect that will prove that the data controller or processor failed in their obligations to protect your personal information and on what level this has affected you. 

Don’t wait if your personal data has been exposed in a pension data breach, as there are strict time limits that must be adhered to when making a claim. If you want to discuss your potential pension data breach compensation claim and get free advice, contact us.

Our team can assess claims for data breaches at no charge. If you have a legal claim, they can connect you to data breach experts on our panel of No Win No Fee data breach solicitors. 

• Call 020 3870 4868.
• Send an enquiry about your claim online. 
• Have a chat in our on-screen live message feature.

Jump To A Section

1. Pension Data Breach Compensation
2. Am I Entitled To Make A Pension Data Breach Compensation Claim?
3. What Could Cause A Pension Data Breach?
4. Proving Your Claim For A Breach Of Pension Data
5. How To Claim Compensation For A Pension Data Breach On A No Win No Fee Basis
6. Further Guidance On How To Claim For Pension Data Breaches

Pension Data Breach Compensation

If your claim for pension data breach compensation is successful, there are two forms of damage you could receive compensation for, and you do not need to have experienced both types of damage in order to be reimbursed. 

Non-material damage is the emotional effects that a breach of your personal information has led you to suffer. This can include where mental health conditions have developed, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety, or depression. This can also include where mental health conditions have worsened. 

The Judicial College Guidelines (JCG) offer guideline compensation values for different mental health conditions at differing severities. These guidelines are looked at with your medical reports when the award for your non-material damage is being calculated. 

Compensation Table

We have taken some psychological injuries and their guideline compensation values from the JCG (only the top entry is not from the JCG). This is so you can see some guideline figures for what can be awarded for emotional impacts in a data breach claim. 

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Type of harm	Severity	Guideline values	Comments
Very serious emotional effects with significant monetary losses	Very Serious	Up to £150,000+	Very serious psychological injuries with resulting substantial monetary losses. This can include lost income.
Psychiatric damage	Severe (a)	£54,830 to £115,730	The prognosis is poor with marked problems with all aspects of life. For example: education and work, relationships with family and friends and there will also be future vulnerability.
	Moderately severe (b)	£19,070 to £54,830	The prognosis is more optimistic but there are significant problems with aspects of life.
	Moderate (c)	£5,860 to £19,070	While there have been problems dealing with aspects of life there has been an improvement and the prognosis is good.
	Less severe (d)	£1,540 to £5,860	Taken into consideration for this award is the length of time which sleep and daily activities are affected.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder	Severe (a)	£59,860 to £100,670	Permanent effects that prevent the person functioning at the pre-trauma level or working. Every aspect of life is badly affected.
	Moderately severe (b)	£23,150 to £59,860	There is a better prognosis because of some recovery from professional help. But the effects on aspects of life will still be, for the foreseeable future, significantly disabling.
	Moderate (c)	£8,180 to £23,150	Continuing effects are not grossly disabling because they have largely recovered.
	Less severe (d)	£3,950 to £8,180	A virtual full-recovery is made between 1-2 years.

Material Damage

Material damage is the financial effects that a breach of your personal data led you to suffer. For example, a loss of earnings due to time away from work while you recover from the impact on your mental health. 

Whatever financial losses that a data breach has led you to have, you must have evidence of these losses. Otherwise, you may not be reimbursed for your material damage. So, you should try and keep hold of payslips, bank statements, and proof of the sort. 

Our team can provide more information on how much compensation could be awarded in a pension scheme data breach claim. 

Am I Entitled To Make A Pension Data Breach Compensation Claim?

The Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) plus the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) are the legislations in place that protect your personal information. Personal data is any type of information that can identify who you are. 

These data protection laws assert the responsibilities of data controllers and data processors to make sure they store, handle, and process your data safely. The role of the data controller is to determine the purposes of processing your personal data.

Whereas the data processors actually process the information. Data controllers can either fulfil both tasks themselves or outsource data processing to an external party. 

Wrongful conduct is when either a data controller or processor does not abide by the DPA and UK GDPR. Some cases of wrongful conduct could result in a personal data breach. Article 4 of the UK GDPR defines a personal data breach as a security incident that leads to either accidental or unlawful destruction, unauthorised disclosure of, access to, alteration, or loss of personal data. 

Alternatively, Article 82 of the UK GDPR establishes criteria that need to be proven for your data breach claim to be eligible:

• The data controller or processor did not abide by data protection law.
• This wrongful conduct has led to a breach of your personal data.
• Due to the breach, you’ve suffered emotional or financial impacts. 

So, by speaking with us, our team can confirm the eligibility to claim for a pension data breach for free and you can maybe begin the next steps of your case. 

Time Limits

The majority of data breach claims have a 6-year time limit imposed on them. This means you must initiate legal proceedings within the limitation period. However, when the claim is being made against a public body, or if a breach of your human rights is involved, then this time limit is changed to 1 year. There are also other exceptions. 

Because it is essential to begin your pension data breach compensation claim within the time limit, contact us as soon as you can. 

What Could Cause A Pension Data Breach?

Some of your personal data includes your phone number, your name, and your national insurance number. As part of your pension fund data, there may also be special category data about you. Special category data is personal data which needs extra protection since the information is deemed more sensitive, for example, data concerning your health. 

Here are ways in which a pension personal data breach could occur due to wrongful conduct:

• Your pension provider suffered a cyber attack or cyber incident due to inadequate security measures. So, hackers got access to members data, including your name, address, National Insurance number, unique identification information, employment data and the amount of financial contributions you had made. This caused severe psychological stress.
• Your pension provider accidentally sent an email that was meant for you to a different email address in a human error. On the email is your personal data and other customer data including information about memberships to the fund. Affected individuals could have the right to seek compensation. 

Proving Your Claim For A Breach Of Pension Data

To make a pension data breach compensation claim, the breach of your personal information must have been caused by the data controller or processor not adhering to data protection laws and you will need evidence to show this in your case. Also, to make a claim, you must have suffered financial loss or mental illness, again you will need evidence to prove this. 

Thus, here are the types of evidence you can collect for your case:

• If your rights or freedoms are put at risk from a data breach, the organisation has a duty to notify you of the breach without undue delay. They may send a letter of notification notifying you that your data has been involved in a breach. You should retain this letter as evidence in case you go on to seek pension data breach compensation. 
• Retain other correspondence, such as emails and letters, from the organisation discussing the data breach with you. 
• If you are not satisfied with the response you receive from the organisation regarding the data breach, you can escalate your complaint internally. After this, you can contact the  Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). As an independent body within the UK, the ICO upholds information rights. You must do this within 3 months from the last meaningful communication with the defendant. The organisation has 72 hours to notify the ICO of a notifiable data breach. 
• Proof of your financial losses in the form of bank statements, payslips, etc. 
• Proof of emotional effects, for example, a copy of your medical records. 

If a specialist data protection solicitor on our panel takes on your case, they can assist you in collecting evidence for your pension data breach claim. So, to see whether you can be connected, get in touch. 

How To Claim Compensation For A Pension Data Breach On A No Win No Fee Basis

So, if our team determines that you’re eligible to claim pension data breach compensation, you can be connected to our panel of No Win No Fee specialist data breach solicitors. Once appointed, you will be offered a type of No Win No Fee arrangement under a Conditional Fee Agreement (CFA).

No matter your financial circumstances, a CFA allows claimants to be represented by a solicitor. This is because there are no upfront or ongoing fees that the claimant needs to pay for the work that their solicitor does for them. This also stands if the pension data breach claim does not have a successful result. 

Alternatively, if your claim is successful, a small percentage of your compensation will be deducted by your solicitor. This small percentage is known as the success fee. The law puts a limit to the maximum percentage that can be taken. 

Contact Us

Why contact us at UK Law if you want to seek advice in claiming compensation if your personal data was breached? Because our team have a lot of experience in guiding people on what steps they could take.

You could also be appointed a No Win No Fee solicitor from our panel. They can benefit you by making the data breach claims process a whole lot simpler. So, here is how you can get in touch today:

• Call 020 3870 4868.
• Send an enquiry about your claim online. 
• Have a chat in our on-screen live message feature.

Further Guidance On How To Claim For Pension Data Breaches

For further guidance on pension data breach compensation claims, try browsing these other guides:

Some of our guides on UK Law:

• If the information on your pension was stored physically instead of electronically, find out how to claim compensation if your personal data was not secured or locked away appropriately.
• Read more about how data breach compensation calculators work to see what could be awarded in successful claims.
• Find out what your rights are as a data subject if your personal data was breached.

Other resources:

• Gov.UK – a guide to understanding cyber security.
• NHS – mental health services and where to get support.
• Information Commissioner’s Office – steps on how to report a breach.
• Pensions Regulator UK Government – Workplace pensions laws 

We hope you feel more assured about what steps you can take next. If your personal data was breached, our contact services are live 24/7. So, get in touch with us whenever for support.