Government has pledged that its data bill will give the UK economy a £10bn boost but, as PublicTechnology discovers, the legislation could also have a big impact on public services
After introducing new data laws to parliament this week, the government’s public pronouncements about the legislation led with the claims that the measures will “boost the UK economy by £10bn”.
The Data Use and Access Bill is comprised of “three core objectives” and, alongside the headline economic growth, the laws are also focused on “making people’s lives easier”.
The third of the legislation’s central aims, meanwhile, is “improving public services”. In order to do so, the government has proposed a range of new measures – including additional frameworks in some areas, while others will see their current requirements loosened.
Here is what the new laws might mean for the public sector and the citizen services it provides.

NHS standards
To support the health service and social care sector, the bill – the rollout of which will be overseen by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – proposes that all suppliers of software, hardware and IT services will be obligated to comply with new “information standards”. These consistent requirements will make sure that “health and care data is recorded and managed in the same way, [which] will lay the foundations for patient information to flow safely, securely, and seamlessly” between individual NHS and social care organisations.

According to government guidance documents explaining the new laws, these measures will help address the challenges caused by a current landscape in which critical operational systems are “currently not uniformly based on information standards that enable information to be accessed and shared in real time across the entire health and social care system”.
The government estimates that the new measures will save the NHS workforce a collective total of 140,000 hours each year by speeding up access to patient data. The increased accuracy of these records, meanwhile, will reduce the duplication of tests by up to 10%, resulting in annual savings of more than £6m.
The laws also have “the potential to reduce medication errors by 6.8 million and prevent 20 deaths per year” caused by such mistakes, according to the government’s projections.

Removing justification for police data use
Under the current legal framework, every time a police officer accesses a citizen’s personal data – or shares this information with another party – they are required to record in writing their justification for doing so. This is a manual process, which the government claims is “an unnecessary burden” on officers. Moreover, the guidance claims that “persons misusing data are highly unlikely to admit to this in a formal log or to enter an honest justification… [thus] the justification is likely to be of little use in a misconduct investigation”.
The need for officers to justify in writing the need for personal data access is to be scrapped under the new laws. Although the government added that, while it will be “removing this one element of the logging requirements, [it is] retaining the others that are useful”.
Scrapping the justification process will free up as much as 1.5 million hours of police time each year, equating to cost savings of £42.8m, according to projections.

“Data is the DNA of modern life and quietly drives every aspect of our society and economy without us even noticing – from our NHS treatments and social interactions to our business and banking transactions. It has the enormous potential to make our lives better, boosting our National Health Service, cutting costs when we shop, and saving us valuable time. With laws that help us to use data securely and effectively, this Bill will help us boost the UK’s economy, free up vital time for our front-line workers, and relieve people from unnecessary admin so that they can get on with their lives.”
Technology secretary Peter Kyle

Registration reform
The government claims that the data legislation will “pave the way towards modernising the registration of deaths in England and Wales from a paper-based system to an electronic birth and death register”.
In doing so, the law will seemingly empower the Home Office to press on with a major digital reform programme intended to deliver digital services to support the 1.5 million births, stillbirths, adoptions, deaths, marriages, and civil partnerships that government is required to formally register each year.
The department’s Civil Registration Service Transformation Programme got underway this year – but did so without the necessary legal framework needed to enable citizens to register major life events remotely. Such legislative provisions were put forward by the previous government, but the bill was not passed into law before the election.
Home Office project documents published over the summer included details of departmental research that found that, with the current requirement for in-person registration, citizens “travel on average 50 miles to register a death”.
But Labour’s bill will allow the registration to be “carried out over the phone”, according to the government.

Rights, research and regulation
The bill is intended to lay the legal foundations for so-called ‘smart data’ schemes, in which an individual or business is given the option to share sensitive information with authorised third parties. Applications for these schemes include open banking platforms, where consumers that have provided their consent can see financial information and make payments from a range of different accounts through one digital service.
Government claims that the laws introduced this week will give ministers at DSIT and HM Treasury “the power to introduce new Smart Data schemes through regulations which will specify the scope of a scheme… including: who is required to provide data; what data they are required to provide; how and when they must provide that data; [and] how that data is secured and protected, including who authorises access to data”.

For individuals, the legislation will mark a progression from the current data-protection legal landscape which “already allows individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data”, according to the bill’s accompanying guidance.
“Smart data takes this further by allowing consumers to request their data be directly shared to authorised and regulated third parties, whilst establishing a supporting framework to ensure data security,” the document adds.
Data held by firms operating online platforms will be subject to a new “researcher data access regime”, in which accredited experts can “conduct robust and independent research into online safety trends”.
Working in concert with the nascent online safety laws, this “move will boost transparency and evidence on the scale of online harms and the measures which are effective in tackling them”.
The Information Commissioner’s Office will remain in place as “the UK’s independent authority responsible for regulating data protection and privacy laws” and, once the bill becomes law, the watchdog will “revamped… with a new structure and powers of enforcement, ensuring people’s personal data will be protected to high standards”.
Details of this overhaul are will be provided in due course – as will the ICO’s full and formal response to the bill.
But, in his initial response, commissioner John Edwards said that “we welcome the introduction of the Data Use and Access Bill in the House of Lords and look forward to seeing it progress through parliament to Royal Assent”.
He added: This is an important piece of legislation which will allow my office to continue to operate as a trusted, fair and independent regulator and provide certainty for all organisations as they innovate and promote the UK economy.”