Lake Alice data breach: Minister Erica Stanford ‘frustrated’ over delays in completing investigation
Senior minister Erica Stanford is frustrated at repeated delays for Lake Alice survivors waiting for answers about how their personal details were exposed during an “unacceptable” privacy breach.
Stanford has ordered an investigation into the breach, which evolved after a Crown Response Office (CRO) staffer accidentally used the carbon copy (or “cc”) function instead of the blind carbon copy (or “bcc”) function, which hides recipients’ email address details, when sending a group email to survivors. The email addresses of the recipients were inadvertently exposed to anyone else who received the email.
“Of course I am frustrated, I am frustrated with the whole situation right from the very start for a number of reasons,” she said.
“We had spent a long time making sure that this process went really well, and for this to happen at the very last hurdle was extraordinarily disappointing.”
The CRO chief executive apologised at the time and said the staffer immediately apologised to each of the survivors and acknowledged this was unacceptable.
The minister, who leads the Government’s response to the Royal Commission’s landmark Abuse in Care inquiry, said the release of the findings from the report had been delayed twice.
In a letter to the Herald responding to a request under the Official Information Act, Stanford said the report was now expected to be completed in April, but it was not known when information relating to the findings would be released more widely.
She acknowledged there were “some complexities” with the nature of the review and “while it is concerning, I want them to do a good process to make sure that the public can hold them to account for what happened”.
The CRO sits within the Public Service Commission. In a statement, the commission said it always tried to work toward an indicative date, but reviews and inquiries could often take longer than it would hope.
“Our focus is on getting it right, that is the priority. The reviewer’s work is ongoing (we can’t say exactly when it will be done).”
Stanford said she was “very disappointed” about the breach, which is why she “wrote a very strongly worded letter to the Public Service Commissioner [Sir Brian Roche] expressing my upset about what happened”.
That letter, released to the Herald under the Official Information Act, asks Roche to launch a review that investigates “why the email was sent at all when my office had provided feedback ... that legal counsel should be the ones engaging with their clients on the release of the report”.
She told the Herald her office had asked the CRO not to contact survivors directly because “we knew, because we talk to them all the time, that getting unsolicited emails about Lake Alice is really traumatic for them, given what they’ve been through”.
In the scathing letter to Roche, Stanford requested that the staffer responsible be barred from working on other Lake Alice-related issues “while matters relating to the privacy breach are underway, given the conflict of interest this presents”, and that it would not be appropriate for the staffer to attend officials’ meetings.
As previously reported by the Herald, Stanford also asked Roche to personally sign formal apologies to the more than 30 survivors who were caught up in the breach. She noted most survivors had never spoken publicly about their experiences, and some had not even disclosed to the people closest to them that they were at Lake Alice.
Last year, after the release of the Royal Commission’s report into Abuse in Care, the Government formally acknowledged that what some children and young people experienced at the psychiatric hospital amounted to torture. In the 1970s, patients were subjected to painful and immobilising paraldehyde injections and given electric shocks without anaesthetic.
The independent arbiter, who reviewed survivors’ experiences for redress payments, described in a report that the treatment of some Lake Alice survivors was “cruel and malevolent”. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon described the treatment as “reprehensible” and delivered a formal apology to all Abuse in Care survivors in 2024.
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.