The Business Case to enable the UK Statistics Authority to access data from the Student Record for England and Wales, held by the Higher Education Statistics Agency and owned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, is available online.
Issue date: 16 October 2009
Type: Statement
Draft Regulations were laid before Parliament by Angela Smith, Minister of State for the Cabinet Office on 17 June 2009 to enable the Higher Education Funding Councils to disclose information about students attending higher education institutions in England and Wales to the UK Statistics Authority (the preferred name for the Statistics Board) in order to improve population statistics.
The laying of these Draft Regulations is the second use of the information sharing provisions in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.
The regulations were considered by the House of Lords (in Grand Committee) on Wednesday 8 July 2009 and subsequently approved by the House of Lords on 15 July 2009.
The debate in the House of Commons is scheduled to take place on 20 October 2009.
If the regulations are approved then arrangements will be made for the specified data to be transferred at the earliest opportunity.
As part of the development of the draft regulations and, in accordance with guidance published by the Information Commissioner's Office, ONS carried out a Privacy Law Compliance Check in order to ensure that the proposed transfer of data would comply with a range of privacy legislation.
Detailed assessment of relevant legislation including the Data Protection Act 1998 showed that the proposed disclosure is lawful and does not breach any statutory provisions in respect of the processing, transfer or handling of the specified data.
The results of these investigations are set out in the attached report which has been considered and approved by the Senior Information Risk Owners in the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales.
