Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, with reference to the injunction granted by the Family Division on 22 June 2001 in respect of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, what data security policies and procedures apply to his and other government departments and all counsel instructed in connection with that injunction, including communicating information by email; and what role his Department's Data Protection Officer and the data protection officers of other government departments play in instructing counsel in regard to data protection.

The Attorney General’s Office and the Government Legal Department are bound by statutory obligations and act in accordance with publicly available policies on the gov.uk website, as well as the Subject Access Code of Practice published by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is available here.

The Attorney General’s guidelines on information security and government work that are followed by external counsel doing government work are available here.

Guidance for handling protectively marked material that is followed by external counsel is available here.

The Attorney General’s Office also has an internal Office Security Policy which is not published, because it contains very specific security information about the office necessary to protect information and staff which it would not be appropriate to publish.

External counsel that do government work are data controllers in their own right with all the attendant responsibilities that entails. They are members of a professionally regulated body and formally undertake to maintain the integrity of the data that they handle.