Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether probabilistic record-linkage tools used by the Department are used to link records relating to individuals across departmental boundaries; and what assessment he has made of the potential implications for individuals of being automatically included within, or excluded from, such cross-departmental linked identities.

The Ministry of Justice mostly uses probabilistic record-linkage tools to link internal administrative datasets (such as court, prison and probation data), while most linking across departmental boundaries uses deterministic linking. However, there are a small number of projects that use probabilistic matching across departmental boundaries for analytical and research purposes, such as:

• Crown Prosecution Service data has recently been linked probabilistically to prisons and probation data, as part of work to join up data across the criminal justice system to improve understanding of the whole end-to-end system.

• Prisoner and family relationship data was linked with HMRC Child Benefit records to estimate the number of children affected by parental imprisonment.

The results of this linking are used for analytical and research purposes, informing policymakers with better quality evidence rather than informing decisions at an individual level.

All data-linking activity is subject to the Ministry of Justice's established governance arrangements, including completion of a Data Protection Impact Assessment where required and engagement with the Ministry of Justice AI & Data Science Ethics Framework. These processes consider a wider range of ethical, legal and data protection issues including the potential implications for individuals of being included within, or excluded from, linked datasets.