The Great North Care Record is a local initiative led by the Connected Health Cities initiative and supported by general practices, hospitals, community and mental health trusts across the North East and North Cumbria region. It aims to make an agreed set of information from each organisation immediately available between health and care professionals using a secure, electronic system to help provide the best treatment.

The Department understands that people receiving treatment at emergency departments or out of hours services ‘opt in’ at the point of care by giving permission for their Great North Care Record to be viewed by health professionals and that people can ‘opt out’ of the scheme via their general practitioner practice.

The Department has not made any assessment of the effectiveness of these arrangements.

Psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis are part of group of musculoskeletal conditions referred to collectively as spondyloarthritis. This term also refers to conditions including: reactive arthritis; enteropathic arthritis; and undifferentiated spondyloarthritis. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence advises that spondyloarthritis has a reported prevalence in Western Europe of between 0.8% in 1.7%.

Improving Lives - the Work, Health and Disability Green Paper, published on 31 October 2016, set out the Government’s commitment to work with NHS England to identify opportunities for regular collection of data about incidence, prevalence, clinical activity and outcomes of musculoskeletal conditions and services in England. The Government’s Mandate to NHS England reiterated this commitment. On 30 November 2017 the Government published Improving Lives - The Future of Work, Health and Disability in response to the Green Paper. In building on the commitment in the Green Paper to identify opportunities for routine data collection about musculoskeletal incidence, prevalence, clinical activity, and outcomes, the report set out that a data advisory group, led by Arthritis Research UK, has been examining the issue. On 1 December 2017 the advisory group presented its recommendations to NHS England, which is currently considering the appropriate next steps. Improving Lives - The Future of Work, Health and Disability can be found at the following link:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/improving-lives-the-future-of-work-health-and-disability

We do not believe that collecting information on pupils being prevented from attending school outside the formal exclusions process is practical.

The government has recently announced an externally led review of exclusions practice and implications for pupil groups disproportionately represented in the national statistics. The review will consider how schools use exclusion and how this impacts on all pupils, but particular why some groups of children are more likely to be excluded from school. The department will publish full details of the review, including how views can be submitted, in due course.

Access to Open Banking Application Programming Interfaces is primarily a decision for the Open Banking Implementation Entity. The Open Banking Implementation Entity currently have no plans to allow third parties wishing to perform account aggregation services, that are not registered as Account Information Service Providers, to gain access to the Open Banking APIs. There have been no discussions with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Open Banking Implementation Entity on changing this position

Access to Open Banking Application Programming Interfaces is primarily a decision for the Open Banking Implementation Entity. The Open Banking Implementation Entity currently have no plans to allow third parties wishing to perform account aggregation services, that are not registered as Account Information Service Providers, to gain access to the Open Banking APIs. There have been no discussions with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Open Banking Implementation Entity on changing this position

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport, regularly reviews the fees levied to access driver records. The last review took place in 2017.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) keeps the fees it charges for data release under regular review. The charges levied are intended to recover the full cost of providing the information, so that the DVLA neither profits at the expense of customers nor makes a loss for taxpayers to subsidise. This is in line with HM Treasury’s Managing Public Money guidance.

Over time, the costs of individual DVLA services can slightly increase or decrease, depending in part on the volume of requests, leading to a small surplus or deficit in the short term.

It is our intention to publish the dataset before the end of January 2018 and I have written separately to the Honourable member to advise him of our aim to publish before Christmas.

I have discussed with the Chief Executive of the Libraries Taskforce and the Chief Executive of The Library and Information Association (CILIP) release of the Libraries Taskforce dataset. I have also discussed with the President of the Society of Chief Librarians the need for better data and evidence to help local authorities to improve their library service delivery.

Nationality data is not used in the data matching process that matches Department for Education data with the Home Office.

The current Memorandum of Understanding between the Department and the Home Office, which was revised in October 2016, is in the House Library.

We are working to ensure we have the right business support for everyone, including women, to set up and grow a business.

We carry out and publish the Longitudinal Small Business Survey which provides estimates of ownership of businesses by women. The 2016 survey can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/small-business-survey-reports.

Start-Up Loans provide funding and intensive support to new entrepreneurs. As at the end of October 2017, there were over 20,130 loans issued to women totalling over £132.5m. To date 39% of start-up loans have been issued to women.

Government has also supported and invested in the creation of a network of 38 Growth Hubs (one in each Local Enterprise Partnership area), providing businesses across England with tailored advice and support.

The Business Support Helpline also provides information and guidance to people across England - 49% of users in the last year (2016-17) were women.

As part of the Industrial Strategy, we will identify ways to tackle barriers faced by female-led businesses in accessing venture capital through new behavioural research commissioned by the British Business Bank.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency provides vehicle keeper information to UK police forces for use in road traffic enforcement. This information can already be used by Road Safety Partnerships involving the police to follow up speeding offences.

The government recognises that we need the best possible data to facilitate policy making. The government commissioned Professor Sir Charles Bean to carry out an Independent Review of UK Economic Statistics, which reported in March 2016. Since then, the government has invested over £10m to enable the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to develop world-leading analytical and digital capabilities in economic measurement in line with the review’s recommendations. This funding has delivered a new Data Science Campus – allowing the ONS to utilise ‘big data’ to produce more innovative, timely and accurate statistics – and a partnership with leading academics through the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence to push the frontiers of economic measurement and ensure UK’s economic statistics remain world leading.

The ONS plans to use new powers provided for within the Digital Economy Act 2017 to harness micro-data held by the public sector and commercial data holders for statistics and research purposes.

The ONS is already taking its first steps in using administrative data, to improve its official statistics. Beginning this month, the ONS will be using VAT within its quarterly national accounts. The ONS have also recently published the results of analysis linking firm-level foreign domestic investment data on immediate foreign ownership to firm-level responses to the Annual Business Survey to examine variations in productivity outcomes, and are actively working with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to access microdata including Pay As You Earn (PAYE) data, with a view to incorporating these into measures of household income and UK employment.

In this work the ONS is committed to protecting privacy and confidentiality. In addition to the various legislative safeguards in place, the ONS has established the National Statistician's Data Ethics Advisory Committee, to ensure that the access, use and sharing of public data is ethical and for the public good. Detailed information on how the ONS is keeping data safe is set out on its website.

On Combined Authorities:

Government is working with the new Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) to develop monitoring and evaluation frameworks for each MCA. As part of that we are working with the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth to explore how the impact of key devolved policies could be analysed at the MCA level.

On Local Enterprise Partnerships:

Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) have played a leading role in economic planning since their creation. Since 2013, each LEP has developed a Strategic Economic Plan for their localities using economic data to support their approach to driving growth in their local area.

Claimants are responsible for the information they provide to the Department. If there is any doubt as to the person’s cognitive capacity at the point that information is, or should be supplied, the Department can, if it is appropriate, initiate its appointeeship process. This involves the Secretary of State appointing a third party to act for the claimant in managing their benefit affairs. Where this happens the claimant themselves is no longer responsible for the accuracy of any information subsequently provided to the Department.

If an appointment is made, any advantageous changes which have not been reported will be considered and potentially could be paid from the date of the change. If the change is disadvantageous and there has been an overpayment of benefit, it can be recovered – the appointeeship will not act retrospectively to preclude this being done.