The Council has a statutory obligation under UK GDPR to respond to Subject Access Requests (SARs) within prescribed legislative timescales. Demand for SARs has increased significantly in recent years, rising from 162 requests in 2020/21 to 235 requests in 2024/25. Whilst service performance has improved over this period, completion rates remain below the statutory requirement. The service currently manages a backlog of approximately 100 overdue SARs, predominantly complex social care requests requiring the review and redaction of significant volumes of documentation. The existing manual approach is resource intensive and presents ongoing operational, regulatory and reputational risks. The proposed procurement seeks to implement an AI-enabled redaction solution to improve processing efficiency, support compliance with statutory deadlines and reduce the existing backlog.

Procurement Act 2023

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