Access to personnel records

Q. Please can you advise me regarding the general rules on whether or not an employee can access his/her own personnel file?

A. An employee has the right to access data held about them under the Data Protection Act 1998 - this includes personnel records. It's called the "right of subject access" and is in section 7 of the Act.

The employee's request must be in writing and the employer can make a charge - currently up to a maximum of £10. The employer can refuse to provide the information if this would involve "disproportionate effort", although this is unlikely to apply to personnel records, or if the employee has already been provided with the same information recently - an employee has to wait a reasonable length of time before putting in another request for the data.