Current status: Answered by Jenny Gilruth on 18 June 2024
To ask the Scottish Government on what date its Statistics Public Benefit and Privacy Panel (SPBPP) reportedly granted a request by the University of Strathclyde to access data gathered from 134,0000 children in the Health and Wellbeing Census, and whether it will provide any documentation that shows for what reason any such request was granted, in light of the Information Commissioner's Office advice to the Scottish Government in August 2023 that the arrangements for processing the data did not meet requirements of Article 4(5) of the UK GDPR around pseudonymisation, and Article 25 around Data Protection by Design and Default, which created "serious risks" and put children at risk of "potential harms".
The Scottish Government has a robust process in place when it receives access requests to its data for statistics and research purposes: Scottish Government statistics: request our data - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) .
This web page includes a list of projects that have been approved by the Statistics Public Benefit and Privacy Panel (SPBPP).
The request by the University of Strathclyde to access data gathered in the 2021-22 Health and Wellbeing Census did not progress to final approval and as such this data access request does not feature in the list of approved projects.