Consultation - Recognised legitimate interests: requesting personal information for your public tasks or official functions

Closes 30 Oct 2025

Opened 21 Aug 2025

Overview

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is consulting on draft guidance about recognised legitimate interest: requesting personal information for your public tasks or official functions.

This guidance is for organisations, such as public authorities, who may wish to request that other organisations voluntarily share personal information to help them with their tasks in the public interest and official functions.

Recognised legitimate interest is a new lawful basis for processing that has been added to the UK GDPR by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 but is not yet in force.

This guidance complements our main guidance on recognised legitimate interest (which is also out for consultation). But instead of covering all aspects of this lawful basis, this guidance only covers one part. One of the purposes that recognised legitimate interest covers is where an organisation wants to voluntarily share personal information with a public authority (or those with similar tasks) who has requested it for their public tasks or official functions. This guidance is aimed at those public authorities, or others, who may make such a request and is not aimed at those who may want to rely on this basis.

Your responses will help us to improve our guidance and we welcome your feedback to the questions set out in this survey. They’re split into the following sections:

  • Section 1: About you
  • Section 2: About your organisation
  • Section 3: Your use of personal information
  • Section 4: Questions about the draft guidance
  • Section 5: Costs and benefits
  • Section 6: Final comments

The consultation will remain open until 23:59 (GMT) on 30 October 2025. We may not consider responses received after this deadline.

Privacy statement

For this consultation we may publish in full the responses received from organisations or a summary of the responses. If we do publish any responses, we will remove any personal information, email addresses and telephone numbers from these responses. Please do not share any information in your response which you would not be happy for us to make publicly available. 

Should we receive an FOI request for your response we will always seek to consult with you for your views on the disclosure of this information before any decision is made. For more information about what we do with personal information please see our privacy notice and the section on responding to our surveys.

Please note that we are using the platform Citizen Space to gather this information on our behalf. Citizen Space is provided by, Delib. You can read Delib's privacy policy here

 

Interests

  • Data Sharing
  • Lawful Basis