The PNC has consistently met its service availability targets in recent years; from January 2020 to March 2021 the PNC’s availability was 99.74%, exceeding the Department’s target of 99.65%. However, in January 2021, the PNC experienced a data loss affecting 112,697 person records. The Department’s efforts to recover the data lost were made more difficult by the ageing technology on which the PNC is based.37