Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been affected by merged identities in the 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.

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 pro-active analysis to identify potentially erroneous records so that appropriate remedial work can be undertaken as quickly, and as carefully, as possible, and ideally before the individual is even aware.

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

As part of the Identity Document Linking change, we pro-actively highlighted a small number of records which were sent for manual resolution through our existing processes. We expect that most of these records would have been corrected before the person themselves would become aware.

We do not hold information on how many people have contacted the Home Office due to a merged identity issue which is directly related to the document linking change.

We are not aware of any significant delays to visa application processing as a result of this issue. UKVI also have a triage process in place so that where there may be an outstanding application, cases can be escalated for immediate resolution.