The ICO says that in 2022/23 it handled almost 35,000 data protection complaints, and improved its response times. In April 2022, the ICO responded to one in three data protection complaints within three months. By March 2023, over 95% of data protection complaints were responded to within three months. Land and property services generated the most complaints (12.14%) closely followed by finance, insurance and credit (11.04%) and health sectors (10.52%).

Most complaints are made when individuals failed to receive a copy of personal data or gain right of access (nearly 40% of all complaints). Second most common reason to complain are issues to with transparency, lawfulness and fairness principles. Surprisingly, objections to direct marketing are a source of complaints in just over 1% of all cases – UK organisations therefore seem to have embraced the marketing rules well, or people are less willing to complain about marketing.