Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department has taken to ensure the security of data on children referred to Link Maker for adoption matching services.

Link Maker is a commercial provider and, as a commercial provider, they are required to comply with relevant data protection legislation.

It is the responsibility of adoption agencies to ensure they are satisfied with the safeguards in place to protect the information they provide to any service they use.

We expect adoption agencies to take measures to protect information that they are using to match a child with an adopter.

The department is not required to publish data on the number of (a) referrals and (b) matches made by Link Maker for all agencies in England and Wales. Link Maker publish this data at: https://www.linkmaker.co.uk/data.