The UK Statistics Authority recently accredited the UK Data Service for the provision and preparation of data under Chapter 5 of Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017. The accreditation is valid for a period of five years, until 31 March 2030, subject to annual reviews.
This is a major achievement for everyone connected to the UK Data Service. It underlines our commitment to information security and to providing a high level of service to our users. It will enable us to carry out work that very few organisations are accredited to do and to continue to support researchers across the UK and worldwide.
The Digital Economy Act
Chapter 5 of Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act facilitates the linking and sharing of de-identified data by public authorities for accredited research purposes to support and enable valuable new research to gain insights about UK society and the economy. The UK Statistics Authority is the statutory accrediting body responsible for the accreditation of processors, researchers and their projects.
The Research framework in the Digital Economy Act is underpinned by the Research Code of Practice and accreditation criteria, which was approved by the UK Parliament in July 2018. As the statutory accrediting body, the UK Statistics Authority has established a Research Accreditation Panel to oversee the independent accreditation of processors, researchers and research projects.
Our accreditation
The UK Data Service has held accreditation as a data processor to provision data under the Digital Economy Act since 2020. Every year this accreditation has been reviewed and every five years, there is a full re-accreditation review. This year was the full re-accreditation review. In addition to the review, we also applied to extend our accreditation to both data provision and data preparation.
The decision to approve our accreditation followed a full review in January-March this year. The next review of selected controls will be held in 2026.
David Hall, the Compliance and Regulatory Framework Manager for the UK Data Service, said the enhanced accreditation is a significant development because it places the UK Data Archive in the position where it can not only access government administrative data for distribution for researchers, but also receive data for matching, linking and de-identification.
The Digital Economy Act (DEA) 2017 accredited processors are accredited for the functions of:
- linking, matching, curating and de-identifying of data (preparation); and/or
- storing and provision of access to de-identified data (provision).
There are only 12 organisations (including the Archive) within the UK that have any form of DEA accreditation – seven (including the Archive) have accreditation for preparation of data – at present only five have accreditation for both preparation and provision of data (UK Data Archive; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Research Support Unit; ONS: Data Access Platform; Secure Anonymised Information Linkage Databank; UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration).
We were previously (since March 2020) only able to take already prepared data and distribute it for research. We can now receive data for matching, linking and de-identification, before distribution.