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Written question asked by Lord Brennan of Canton (Labour) on Monday, 18 March 2024, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 25 March 2024 (named day). It was answered by Tom Pursglove (Conservative) on Monday, 25 March 2024 on behalf of the Home Office.

Immigration: Databases

Question

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent estimate he has made of the number of individuals misidentified by the Home Office Person Centric Data Platform in the last 12 months.

Answer

The Person Centric Data Platform (PCDP) holds millions of identities that have been submitted or otherwise provided in support of immigration applications. Individuals have not been ‘misidentified’ by the PCDP. Rather, the Home Office has for some time been aware of issues around ‘merged identity’ - where a single ‘identity island’ has been formed with data belonging to two or more individuals.

The ‘merged identities’ issue affects around 0.02% of PCDP customer records - over 99.98% of records are not impacted by this issue. We have identified around 46,000 records with an identity issue, of which over 13,000 have already been resolved and we have a dedicated team working on the remainder.

The Home Office takes data security and accuracy very seriously. We continue detailed analysis to identify erroneous PCDP records so that appropriate remedial work can be undertaken as quickly, and as carefully, as possible.

Where customers identify an issue with their data, we encourage them to contact the UK Visas and Immigration Contact Centre to enable this to be investigated and resolved.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
19004
Session
2023-24
Grouped for answer
Yes
Subjects
Databases Immigration Maladministration
Contains statistics
Yes
Link
View this Written question on www.parliament.uk