Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to rectify the misidentification of individuals by the Home Office Person Centric Data Platform.

The Person Centric Data Platform (PCDP) holds millions of identities that have been submitted or otherwise provided in support of immigration applications. Individuals have not been ‘misidentified’ by the PCDP. Rather, the Home Office has for some time been aware of issues around ‘merged identity’ - where a single ‘identity island’ has been formed with data belonging to two or more individuals.

The ‘merged identities’ issue affects around 0.02% of PCDP customer records - over 99.98% of records are not impacted by this issue. We have identified around 46,000 records with an identity issue, of which over 13,000 have already been resolved and we have a dedicated team working on the remainder.

The Home Office takes data security and accuracy very seriously. We continue detailed analysis to identify erroneous PCDP records so that appropriate remedial work can be undertaken as quickly, and as carefully, as possible.

Where customers identify an issue with their data, we encourage them to contact the UK Visas and Immigration Contact Centre to enable this to be investigated and resolved.