Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 13 November 2017 to Question 112162 on Data Protection: Small Businesses, what steps his Department is taking to inform small and medium-sized enterprises of the support provided by his Department.

The Government and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) recognise the challenges facing small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) across the UK economy in their preparations for the Data Protection Bill and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The ICO is leading on providing guidance and support to UK organisations and have already published a number of resources on the Commissioner's website (ico.org.uk) to help all organisations prepare. The ICO has: launched a dedicated helpline service for smaller organisations; updated its 'SMEs toolkit' to reflect the requirements of the GDPR; simplified its "12-step" GDPR preparation guidance; and published FAQs for SMEs. To support the ICO the Government delivered an awareness-raising marketing campaign targeted at those organisations and sectors (inc SMEs) most in need of support. There is still more to do in this space and the Government will continue to support the ICO to ensure the UK is prepared.