Covid-19: Information Sharing with Police Forces

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her insight, but I reassure her that the information on the app is not covered by this memorandum of understanding. That is a principle that has been made very clear by the NHS app. This is the data held on CTAS, the Public Health England database, and it remains the property of Public Health England; the MoU is very specific about that. As the noble Baroness is aware, the app is a distributed source of information; it has extremely high privacy barriers, and this MoU does not in any way breach those barriers.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

It is disingenuous for the Minister to say, in answer to my noble friend Lord Hunt, that this is not a health issue. Following on from the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, I imagine the police will have been concerned about the implications for data protection for both themselves and individuals. Therefore, I ask the Minister how personal data that is being handed over to the police is going to be stored. Who will keep it and how will it be handled? Are any discussions on data-sharing taking place or planned involving the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Home Office or Cabinet Office?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the data collected by PHE for the test and trace service is held, as I said, by the Contract Tracing and Advisory Service database—the CTAS database—and it will be provided to the police on request. It is not a question of a wholesale sharing of all data. The data that can be shared with the police are the recorded name and contact details of an individual who has been instructed to self-isolate, the date on which they were told to self-isolate and the date on which the period of self-isolation ends. No testing data or health data are shared with the police at all.