The Board regularly carries out surveys of funds to help fulfil its dual statutory functions;

• To provide advice to the Secretary of State on the desirability of making changes to the Scheme and
• To provide advice to administering authorities and local pension boards in relation to the effective and efficient administration and management of the Scheme.

The Board recently obtained legal advice from Squire Patton Boggs to make sure that it is correctly balancing these functions with the obligations under GDPR and the Equalities Act 2010. It also asked whether funds needed to do anything to ensure they were acting in line with their own GDPR obligations as data controllers.

That advice has now been received, it confirms that:

• The Board has a lawful basis for requesting data from funds under GDPR, namely, to carry out its public tasks. Please see the discussion at para 4.1(d).
• Funds may want to consider amending their standard member privacy notices to make it explicit that the Board will collect data from them for statistical purposes. If they do amend those notices, then funds will also want to consider how to draw this to their members’ attention in the same way as other changes to the policy. Discussion of this is at paragraphs 4.3 and 4.4.
• While the advice indicates that there is no barrier to funds sharing scheme member personal data (SMPD) with the Board (see paragraphs 4.2 and 4.6), it is not the Board’s intention to ever collect SMPD through surveys. The Board will only request anonymised data and will make this clear in all future surveys. This is in line with the established principle that data should be anonymised at the earliest possible stage (see para 4.5). Consequently, the Board does not intend to put in place data sharing agreements with funds, as this might create the impression that it did want to receive SMPD.

While GAD wasn’t the client for this advice (and is responsible for satisfying itself that it has a lawful basis for its use of SMPD) no material concerns were identified in relation to the lawful basis relied upon by the GAD for the generation of the Gender Pensions Gap report.