Councils are entrusted with safeguarding sensitive citizen data, but we've seen massive data breaches over the past year with 43m people affected in the France Travail incident and 2.9bn in the National Public Data breach in the US. Closer to home, there's also been a staggering rise in the number of data breaches at a local level which rose 233% over the course of the past year.

Apricorn carried out a Freedom of Information (FoI) request earlier this year which revealed there were more than 5,000 incidents of lost data and devices disclosed by 17 councils in 2023. The same request found that 1500 data breaches were reported the year before, marking a substantial increase. These findings are supported by a corresponding jump in the incidents disclosed to the Information Commissioner's Office, from 845 to 1,096 incidents in 2023.