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On the 25th May 2018 the Data Protection Act 2018 was implemented by the UK as the General Data Protection Regulation also known as GDPR. It controls how personal information is captured and used by organisations and the government.

Everyone responsible for using personal data has to follow strict rules called ‘data protection principles’ and must ensure that the information they obtain is for a lawful purpose, used fairly and must be transparent about its intended purpose of usage and used explicitly for that purpose only.

Data should also not be kept for more than is necessary, and whilst it is kept, should be kept up to date and handled and secured in a way that does not compromise its protection from unauthorised processing, loss of theft of data.  

It is important to note that there is stronger legal protection for more sensitive information such as race, health, sex life, orientation, ethnic background. There are separate safeguards for personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences.

Under the Data Protection Act 2018, an individual has the right to find out what information the government and other organisations holds about them and this ideally should be provided to the individual within 1 month.  

To make a complaint about the misuse of personal information or lack of security it should be made to the organisation, following their response the complaint can also be made to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

ICO
casework@ico.org.uk
Telephone: 0303 123 1113

The intended purpose of this standard is to promote interoperability and improve the data quality of systems by converging on a common set of POLE data definitions used within Policing. POLE data definitions describe how People, Objects, Locations and Events (POLE) should be formatted. 

There are 44 POLE entities described in this standard including:

• 20 person entities
• 13 object entities
• 5 location entities
• 6 event entities

The standard defines the attributes (field size, format, type) used to create the entities and contains and “entity x attribute map”. It also contains validation rules for these attributes.

This standard is owned by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) and should be regarded as the default data standard for all POLE entities.

Along with the standard, the POLE data model (POLE v1.1.accdb) and data dictionary (POLE data standards - Data dictionary v1.1.xlsx) are also attached below. 

This document provides:
• High level PND requirements
• Overview of Data requirements
• PND Message Schema design
• Data transmission mechanisms
• Data Scope
• Overview of software resources available including Data Test Suite.

Note this document is graded OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE, access can be requested by the 'Contact Us' tab at the top of the page.

This is a data science cookiecutter template for analytical, Python-, or Python and R-based projects within Her Majesty's Government, and wider public sector including policing, where it has been trialled and used as a standardised template for effectively sharing data science work and includes security features using pre-commit hooks to preserve sensitive information.

It also provides an Agile, centralised, and lightweight analytical quality assurance (AQA) process. Pull or merge request templates are used to nudge users to complete this process. This helps meet HM Government best practice on producing quality analysis, as defined in the Aqua Book.

The original developer in GDS has provided a blog post explaining the reasons for creation and provided a live demonstration from March 2021 on version 0.5.3. 

The National Standards Assurance Board reviewed this in January 2022 and found it being owned and actively developed by the Office for National Statistics, Best Practice and Impact team.

Open Referral UK is an open data standard in use by Local Government. This standard establishes a consistent way of publishing and describing information for councils, to ensure the data is effectively used and shared for the benefit of local communities and services (https://www.localdigital.gov.uk/)

This manual has been produced by the NPCC Data Protection, Freedom of Information, information Sharing and Disclosure Portfolio Group on behalf of the NPCC. It is updated and adapted to reflect decisions made by the NPCC, views of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) (where appropriate) and the evolution of the legislation as it is interpreted, challenged or reviewed.

Note that this manual has not yet been updated to reflect the legislative changes arising from The Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments etc)(EU Exit) Regulations 2019 as amended by The Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments etc)(EU Exit) Regulations 2020.

The manual should be regarded as a document that both helps to create an environment across the police service in which compliance can be achieved, and as a means of providing guidance in areas of police business where the Act is regularly applied.

The manual contains a wide variety of information including:

• Breakdown of governance and responsibilities
• Definitions
• General processing (GDPR & DPA Part 2)
• Comparison between General Processing and Law Enforcement obligations
• Law Enforcement processing (Part 3 of DPA)
• Intelligence Service processing (Part 4 of DPA)
• Assessing data protection compliance
• The Commisioner, enforcement & offences
• Case studies
• Wide variety of appendices including
  • Template DPIA
  • Template National data processing contract
  • Template information sharing agreement
  • Template Data Protection policy 

 UTF-8, an encoding form for Unicode character sets, for government digital services and technology encodes all Unicode characters without changing the ASCII code.

Unicode is based on the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set.

UTF-8 is an international standard used by, data scientists, data analysts and developers. It allows you to read, write, store and exchange text that remains stable over time and across different systems. It also have accurately translated languages moving between systems and prevent accidental or unanticipated corruption of text as it transfers between systems.

This makes UTF-8 flexible for a wide range of uses.

The government chooses standards using the open standards approval process and the Open Standards Board has final approval. Read more about the approval process for cross-platform character encoding. 

An agreed and designed common data standards are used by the Criminal Justice System, ICT suppliers to support ICT communications between systems used by Criminal Justice Organisations (CJO) to support CJS operations. They are also used with open data standards as defined in the government’s Open Standards Principles. These common standards are also used to support data analytics, bidding for CJS contracts etc.

The selection of the CJS data standards is made by the CJS Data Standards Forum. This is a technical forum which has representatives from the principal CJOs.

There is a Data Standard Catalogue used to support the exchange of criminal justice information between different CJOs.

There are three different types of data standard reflected in the catalogued:

• formatting standards

• organisational structure standards

• reference data standard

The Data Standard catalogue is constantly reviewed by the Data Standards Forum to ensure a set of standards is produced that is as small as possible while still being fit for purpose. 

Statutory auditors should adhere to the highest ethical standards and should be subject to professional ethics. This Directive aims at high-level to bring about harmonisation of statutory audit requirements as a result of lack of a harmonised approach to statutory auditing in the Community. This was the reason why the Commission proposed, in its 1998 Communication on the statutory audit in the European Union that a creation of a Committee on Auditing which could develop further action in close cooperation with the accounting profession and Member States be established.

The output/recommendation from the committee setup was a Recommendation was a set of Fundamental auditing Principles. The statutory audit requires adequate knowledge of matters such as company law, fiscal law and social law for Audit qualifications obtained by statutory auditors. In order to protect third parties, all approved auditors and audit firms should be entered in a register which is accessible to the public and which contains basic information concerning statutory auditors and audit firms. 


It is important to note that good audit quality contributes to the orderly functioning of markets by enhancing the integrity and efficiency of financial statements. 


The CJS Data Standards Catalogue is a collection of data standards used by Criminal Justice Organisations in England & Wales to support interoperability between their different ICT systems.

If you are a member of a Criminal Justice Organisation and work in the area of data standards then you too can help to shape that change. If you have any questions then please raise them with the Forum representative for your organisation by visiting https://www.gov.uk/guidance/criminal-justice-system-data-standards-forum-guidance.