DATA breaches at Dorset Council are continuing – with indications they might be increasing, despite measures to clamp down on the failures.

Many of the breaches are said to be 'minor', often inadvertently adding people to email chains which they should not have received, or revealing individual email addresses, rather than sending 'blind'.

Independent member of the council's audit and governances committee Simon Roche suggested the council needed to take a more systematic approach to the breaches, rather than deal with each case individually.

"There is a background of data breaches going on and it's got worse… we need to look at it, it might reveal a cultural issues," he said.

Committee chairman Cllr Gary Suttle said the reporting of on-going breaches was "disappointing" with the need to concentrate more on internal procedures.

Service manager for assurance, Marc Eyre, told the committee that one of the reasons for the increase might be that more breaches were being picked up by software which the council had recently started using, which, in turn, would lead to staff learning from that – and the number of breaches then reducing.