Today, the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) opened a call for evidence on Data regulation in the age of AI and other data-intensive technologies. Given how narrow the window is — it closes on 9 September 2026 — this is worth wider attention than calls for evidence typically receive.
The premise of the call is straightforward: the UK’s data protection framework — UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and a patchwork of sector-specific rules (e.g. telecommunications, financial services or technology services) — was built for a world of discrete processing decisions. AI and other data-intensive technologies increasingly operate through supply chains, agentic systems and automated decision-making that do not map cleanly onto that framework. DSIT wants to know, concretely, where the fit is holding and where it is breaking down.
This is not a request for position papers. The call explicitly asks for practical examples: what you tried to do and could, what you wanted to do and could not, and why. That is a more demanding ask than a standard consultation response, but it is the kind of evidence best placed to inform whether the right response is further guidance, targeted change, or more fundamental reform. The scope is organised around five themes: accessing and using data; data quality and downstream impacts; governance across organisational supply chains; transparency and rights; and the overall effectiveness of the framework for AI. But you do not need expertise or examples across all five; a focused submission on the one theme you know well is welcomed.
Calls for evidence work best when the response base reflects the full range of people and organisations affected by the questions being asked. Large firms and established trade bodies are typically well placed to respond, and their evidence matters. But government also needs to hear from smaller organisations, devolved public services, researchers and citizens, whose experience of these rules in practice can look quite different, and whose perspectives are easier to miss without deliberate effort to reach them. A response base that is broad as well as substantive gives any subsequent decision on guidance, targeted change or reform a firmer footing.
A few groups whose input is easy to overlook but particularly valuable here. Practitioners in devolved public services: data protection is reserved, but delivery is not; health and social care data infrastructure, for instance, looks different across Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England, with friction points that differ accordingly, and that variation is itself evidence DSIT needs. Researchers and civil society organisations, who can speak to fairness, accuracy and long-term adaptability from outside any single organisation’s compliance interest. This is precisely the independent evidence that’s hardest to source from industry submissions alone. Individuals, whose experience of exercising data rights, understanding automated decisions, or simply not knowing which rules apply to them is exactly the texture the call asks for and is least likely to arrive unprompted. Smaller organisations and specific sectors across DCMS’s own portfolio — gambling, media and broadcasting, sport, and libraries, museums and heritage — as well as health, education, transport and logistics, and the third sector may not have a trade body speaking for them. Their “what we wanted to do but couldn’t” examples rarely make it into aggregated industry positions.
Responses can be submitted online, by theme, in whatever depth suits your experience; a single worked example on one theme is a legitimate and useful response. Alternative formats and hard-copy submission are available on request via DSIT. If you have practical experience of developing, deploying, procuring or simply living with AI or data-intensive systems, this is an opportunity to shape whether and how the UK’s data framework changes.
Read the full call for evidence and respond (deadline: 23:59 on 9 September 2026)
Digital Society & Policy 