Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I can certainly reassure the Senator about the training but I would not for one minute give her any significant assurance about the scale of improvement that has yet to be achieved. This is a very complex matter and I have addressed it in the public domain on a number of occasions. I have sat in front of some of the people affected by the more serious data breaches, including some cases to which the Senator referred. All I can say to her is that one could not be indifferent to the impact on these people, regardless of the breach being accidental or unintended.

We had a very complex GDPR programme in the agency over the last while, in order to develop much of the technical expertise, but the reality was that we also needed to get out to the front line more quickly. We started a process in late September of training 30 people per session, in two sessions a day, up and down the country. It is online, fully interactive and taught by expert staff. It is a good training programme on which there is very good feedback. Our target is to reach over 3,000 front-line workers by the end of January and to date we have reached around 1,100. A huge effort is going into it but we are some way off reaching a satisfactory level of GDPR compliance because we process information in tens of thousands of interactions throughout the year. We are coming from a historical base, we are challenged and we have 350 locations across the country so there is a way to go. However, I assure the Senator that no effort is being spared in this matter.