Edem v. The Information Commissioner and The Financial Services Authority [2014] EWCA Civ 92

From time to time the Court of Appeal feels the need to steer inferior courts and tribunals away from an over-enthusiastic application of a particular direction of travel signposted by its own previous decisions. In the Edem judgment, published on 7 February 2014, the court has taken the opportunity to restrict significantly the application of its decision more than a decade ago in Durant v. Financial Services Authority, ¹ a case that has been relied on by many commercial data protection practitioners to deny subject access or the wider application of the Data Protection Act 1998 on the grounds that the data were not personal in that they did not relate to the individual in question even though the individual's name appeared as part of the data.