Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to ensure that the digital record of an EU citizen's settled status in the UK is protected against data loss.

Immigration decisions - and the rights and conditions which flow from those decisions - have been recorded digitally by the Home Office since the turn of the century and maintaining digital records of immigration status is not a new concept.

The following safeguards are in place to protect this data from accidental or deliberate loss:

• the data in the central repository for immigration data is copied across three different data centres (or ‘availability zones’ within the Home Office cloud service provider’s region), which prevents any loss of data in the event of a catastrophic failure to one of those data centres. As a further precaution, the data is also copied across the Home Office cloud service provider’s regions which prevents any loss of data in the event of a catastrophic failure to an entire region
• data is modelled in such a way it allows accidental deletions to be undone and a full audit maintained to allow a rollback due to accidental corruption
• frequent backups of immigration data are carried out to act as a point in time snapshot if there is ever a need to refer back in time
• robust security controls are in place to protect personal data against unauthorised access and only those who need access to perform their job are granted. Security and background checks are performed on all staff in these roles to further mitigate the risk there may be a deliberate attempt to corrupt or delete the data.

The Home Office will also look to apply any lessons learnt from the recent issues affecting the PNC to the ongoing management of immigration data, including digital records of immigration status.