The privacy watchdog will today attack a National Health Service trust's "clearly inadequate" records management, in a warning to other public authorities guilty of similar failings.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, will condemn Hounslow Primary Care Trust's "completely unacceptable" handling of a case in which a man asked for information about his father-in-law's stay in a nursing home and death in a hospice. Les Scarth, who made the information requests to Hounslow trust about the 1998 death of his father-in-law, Tom Wells, said the authority's attitude was "diabolical".