Work rota shows everyone's absence for the past two years - is this legal?

[TheCrunchyNutter]

Our work rota is available to everyone in the department on the intranet.

It is colour coded and goes back two years.

I can look back and see when people have taken holiday/sick days and in a couple of cases 'unauthorised absence'.

This does not seem right to me. Sick days are coloured in red.

Can anyone advise me if this is legal, or just a bad idea or am I seeing an issue where there isn't one?

Unless there is some data on there that would fall under the data protection act then its unlikely to be illegal - certainly not good practice though.

I suspect that it might fall under the DPA, as it appears to be indicating the physical or mental health of identifiable individuals, so is classed as 'sensitive personal data'.

Showing the reasons for sickness absence might be inappropriate (sensitive personal data), the basic fact of the absence - something that was evident to others in the workplace - is probably OK.

Have you asked for an explanation of the level of detail?

But don't you think there might be a point at which the number of sick days taken would suggest that someone was seriously ill, which would start to count as information about their health?