President of Latvia Edgars Rinkēvičs has submitted amendments to the Law on the Structure of Public Administration to the Saeima, proposing a framework for processing state and municipal data for reuse within public administration, according to the President’s advisor Mārtiņš Drēģeris.
The legislative initiative aims to improve policy planning, enhance the quality of public services, and promote research and innovation within public administration.
Drēģeris explained that the proposed amendments would establish the Central Statistical Bureau (CSB) as an interdisciplinary data analytics authority with the right to obtain and integrate data, including personal data, from other state and municipal institutions.
“There is a vast amount of data held by Latvia’s public sector — around 700 state information systems.
This is a valuable resource for making better decisions in sectoral development and for delivering higher-quality services. Effective policy planning and analysis often require merging and analyzing data from various state systems to gain a fuller, more accurate understanding of situations, trends, and challenges,” states Rinkēvičs in a letter to the Saeima Presidium.
Currently, institutions are only allowed to process and use the data in their possession for the specific purposes for which the data was collected and for purposes defined in their core functions. The existing legal framework does not allow cross-sectoral data integration, which means that neither data controllers nor other institutions can reuse information already collected from residents and businesses to analyze service delivery, conduct in-depth research, or support policy development, Rinkēvičs argues.
In his letter, the President also notes that the need to use state-held data more effectively for in-depth policy analysis to improve performance was highlighted by business representatives in the 2024 study by the State Competitiveness Commission on competitiveness and the business environment.
“Therefore, following the initiative of the State Competitiveness Commission, I see an opportunity to propose amendments to the Law on the Structure of Public Administration.
The amendments introduce three new legal purposes for data processing: policy planning, service efficiency improvement, and research and innovation.
Additionally, the amendments propose strengthening the CSB as a ‘one-stop shop’ for processing and integrating information from national information systems. This would not only promote data reuse in public administration and reinforce cross-sectoral data analytics, but also contribute to reducing the administrative burden,” the letter states.
The proposed regulation does not affect the current rules for processing special categories of personal data (“sensitive data”), which remain governed by sector-specific laws — including those related to health and criminal records. Nor does it alter the rules for exchanging restricted-access information regulated by special laws.