I am delighted to say that I finally managed to get my LineOne web pages deleted.
The response from the Information Commissioner's Office was not very encouraging. Basically, it seems that the only course of action is to issue a notice under section 10 of the Data Protection Act, requesting that the data be removed. However, the Information Commissioner's Office cannot force the company to comply. If they do not respond to the section 10 notice, the only recourse is to the courts and you would have to demonstrate that the non-deletion of the information is causing "unwarranted and substantial damage or distress".
Whilst the non-deletion of the old site was frustrating, I could not realistically claim that it was causing substantial damage or distress so, as a last resort, I thought it would be worth trying to contact the CEO of TalkTalk directly. A bit of Googling brought up a web page with the
email addresses of various CEOs. A few hours after emailing, I received a reply from Dido Harding, saying that she would pass on my email to one of her staff to resolve.
The next morning, I received an email from someone in the CEO's office who promised to sort it out. I had said that I knew the password for the webspace so, a few hours later a telecomms engineer from TalkTalk phoned and asked for the account password. The next morning, the website was deleted.
So, after all these months of frustration, it was sorted within two days of emailing the CEO. Whilst I'm very happy, it is still very disappointing that it took this and that there isn't a solution in place via first line technical support. It does remind me why I left TalkTalk in the first place.
I don't know if this would have worked if I hadn't known the password for my webspace so it may not help those of you still struggling, but I thought I'd mention that I had managed to get a resolution in the end.
Good luck,
Tracey