Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many subject access requests her Department has (a) received and (b) responded to within the statutory limit in the last five years.

In replying to the Parliamentary Question, I have taken the “last five years” to refer to the period 1/9/2017 to 30/9/2022 inclusive.

Prior to GDPR coming into force on 25/5/2018, Subject Access Requests (SARs) were actioned by Local Data Disclosure Officers at District level.

Therefore, there is no DWP MI available regarding the receipt or clearance of SARs prior to this date.

From 25/5/2018, the SAR process in DWP was centralised. However, the administration of SARs did not start to transition to the eCase software until July 2018, and further SARs in respect of Compensation Recovery Unit only were managed by a separate team at that time. Therefore, full and/or accurate MI is not available for this period, nor is the information still available to retrospectively create it due the information retention period.

From December 2018, DWP commenced monthly reporting of SAR performance to the ICO. Full and accurate MI is available from this date. Therefore, the following information relates to SARs received or completed from 1/12/2018 to 30/09/2022 inclusive.

Not all Subject Access Requests received will progress to be processed & records released. Some requests require further clarification to verify the identity of the requester. Where this is not provided the SAR is not validated and will be Closed NRN (No Response Necessary). Also, other requests may later be identified as not being a SAR, but for other areas of DWP. These will also be Closed NRN. I have therefore included the volume of SARS that were Closed NRN over the same period.