UK Biobank Data

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I can absolutely assure the noble Lord that the Government will issue guidance. That guidance was in development anyway, and I expect it to come out within the next few weeks. I can also assure him that other platforms use secure data platforms where the downloading of data is not possible. There was a rather unusual situation with UK Biobank where the data was downloadable, which is not true for many others. We absolutely need to use this to build confidence that these data are properly looked after and used for the purposes for which they were given.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I will ask the Minister a couple of questions. This breach has had a silver lining: to remind us that the UK Biobank is a remarkable project and an act of British soft power—and, indeed, altruism—which has been used by 22,000 researchers in 60 countries and produced 18,000 research papers. It really is remarkable; when we beat ourselves up in this country, it is useful to be reminded about the remarkable things we are capable of doing. I described it as an act of altruism, but what is the cost of remedying, as it were, the procedures that led to the breach, and is the cost of the UK Biobank shared by the institutions that use this remarkable resource all around the world, or does it fall entirely on the British taxpayer? Can the Minister also comment on the role of the Chinese Government? It seems to me that we were quick to reach a conclusion when this story initially broke that, somehow, they were involved, but, as is mentioned in the Statement, this was simply a theft that took place in China and did not in any way involve bad faith by the Chinese Government.

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

UK Biobank, for all the reasons stated, is expensive to run, and it is run with a mix of funding from government, charities and industry, with the major funders being the UK Government and the Wellcome Trust over many years. The principle of it has been to give access to people; therefore, there is not a big cost put on its users. On our approach, we knew that the leak was in China, and we therefore immediately asked the embassy in China to link to the Government there to see if they could help us get these taken off the website. We did not make any conclusion about where they had come from; we just thought that that would probably be the fastest way to get these removed.