Requesting SS Data and Dead Parents

[OverlyFragrant]

Hello
We (siblings) had a pretty abusive and neglectful childhood. I've largely accepted it and moved on, my youngest brother (21) is still in the process.
There's a lot of things he is still trying to make sense of, so I suggested he ask for his case notes from social services.
The notes have come back back are pretty useless as pretty much everything is redacted. We've gone back and asked them to unredact things related to parents as both are now dead and GDPR no longer applies to them.
They've replied saying that confidentiality of the deceased is maintained unless we (brother) can provide proof of conservatorship of late parents estate. I'm pretty sure this is not the correct process.
Can anyone advise.

I think this may be right. In the NHS, confidentiality of deceased people is maintained under common law. You have to have a right to have the confidentiality set aside. What counts as a right is limited and will depend on the circumstances. The NHS has to redact information about other people that are in a patient's notes regardless of whether they are dead or not, before they are shared with the patient under FOI.

Here's what ICO says about such situations, you may be able to contact them for more specific advice. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/right-of-access/information-about-other-individuals/

Unfortunately, it's a completely ridiculous thing, but they will stick to it come hell or high water. My own notes came back utterly useless. I wish instead of just blacking them out they'd replace Bob with "A" and Margery with "B" etc so you could actually usefully follow the notes at the very least even if you didn't know who they were talking about. What's the point of being able to legally access your data when all they give you is chewed up word salad that you can't actually make any sense of? It defeats the point completely. But they'll just double down and say "data protection" as if that absolves them of everything instead of making the process actually work for the service users.

Medical records personable to the deceased person are different to the child protection records of child where parents are the deceased.

I am talking about redacting information given by or relating to someone other than the person whose notes they are. That's what the ICO link is about, the disclosure of third party information.

Medical records have their own specific laws

Your right is to access your personal data - not the personal data of anyone else. Although data protection legislation doesn't apply to the personal data of deceased people, the Council are right in that where a duty of confidentiality exists, such as for social work record, those duties continue to apply beyond someones death.

Subject Access for social work records will always be carefully balanced because those records contain personal data of a number of people and, as above, your only entitlement is to your own data. Some social services departments will have a team of people whose role involves supporting adults to access and understand the information that is held about the decisions made in their childhood so it is perhaps worth checking if your local department has this - otherwise unredacted records would only be released in response to a court order requiring these being provided, so you may wish to seek legal advice to see if such an order is possible.

Indeed but those requirements generally have to comply with common law and with ICO too. @JustAnotherSod has explained the situation as I understand it and its pretty much the same as the NHS requirements. The other thing which i will mention which may or may not apply to your brother's situation, is that holders of such records also have to judge whether releasing the information would do harm to the rerquestor or to others. This is most often necessary when the requestor has emotional or mental health issues and its a clear risk that disclosure of certain information would put them or others at risk of harm. I am aware that this is a contentious issue.