Data (Use and Access) Act 2025

Overview of the Act

Reproduced verbatim from the Explanatory Notes published with the Act on legislation.gov.uk (Crown Copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0). Explanatory Notes are prepared by the responsible government department and are not part of the Act.

This Act intends to harness the power of data for economic growth, support a modern digital government, and improve people’s lives.

The provisions on Smart Data schemes allow for the secure sharing of customer data, e.g., held by a communications provider or financial services provider, upon the customer’s request, with the customer themselves or authorised third-party providers (ATPs). ATPs use the customer’s data to provide services for the consumer or business, such as efficient switching and personalised market comparisons, account management, for example via account aggregation, and cross-sector user-centric control of data.

The Act establishes a legislative structure for the provision of digital verification services in the United Kingdom (UK), where providers of those services wish to be registered on a government register. This structure aims to enable users to recognise trusted digital identity providers within the digital identity market and enable digital identities and attributes to be used with the same confidence as paper documents. These measures make provision for the preparation and publication of a trust framework of rules concerning the provision of digital verification services, together with supplementary rules (known as supplementary codes) for specific use cases. They also establish a publicly available register of persons providing digital verification services that are certified against those rules and supplementary rules (if applicable). Finally, they provide that registered persons can use a trust mark and have access to an information gateway, to enable public authorities to disclose personal information to registered persons for identity and eligibility verification purposes.