Research, Archiving and Statistics Provisions - Consultation on Updated Guidance

Overview

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is consulting on updates to our guidance on the Research, Archiving and Statistics (RAS) Provisions.

The updates to our guidance follow the introduction of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (DUA Act 2025). Your responses will help us provide any further clarity needed in the final guidance update.

We have revised our criteria for scientific research after requests for more clarity in this area. We particularly welcome your views on the new text.

We would also welcome your views on our position around the new disproportionate effort exemption (under section 77 of the DUA Act 2025) from the requirement to inform data subjects that you intend to re-use previously collected data for research purposes. 

We welcome feedback to the questions set out in the survey. This survey is split into the following sections:

• Section 1: About you 
• Section 2: About your organisation
• Section 3: Your views on our draft updated guidance
• Section 4: Your views on the impact of our updated guidance
• Section 5: Final comments

The consultation will remain open until 23.59 on 27 April 2026. We may not consider responses received after this deadline.

A PDF file showing all of the consultation questions is available below.

Privacy Statement

For this consultation, depending on your preference, 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 email addresses and telephone numbers from these responses. Please do not to 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 data please see our privacy notice, and the section on responding to our consultations and surveys.

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