Points of Order

Jane Ellison Excerpts

Monday 3rd March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Not at the moment. I can say to the hon. Lady that the public health Minister did indicate to me a willingness to respond to her intended point of order. The Minister is in her place, and we should hear from her now.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jane Ellison)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond directly. In responding to the Westminster Hall debate on Thursday 27 February and in relation to the points made by the hon. Member for Leeds East (Mr Mudie) concerning the release of information to the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, I did say that the data that were used were

“publicly available, non-identifiable and in aggregate form.”—[Official Report, 27 February 2014; Vol. 576, c. 212WH.]

I was made aware on Friday 28 February that the information I had to hand during the debate did not include the latest clarification received from the Health and Social Care Information Centre. I therefore wrote to the Chair of the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess), on Friday to inform him of that. I have today formally written to him and the Members who were present at the debate to correct the statement, and I have copied that to the House of Commons Library.

The correct position was that the faculty requested pseudo-anonymised information and said it would publish it only as anonymous information with all identifiers stripped out. My assertion that the data provided to the faculty were anonymised and publicly available was therefore incorrect, for which I offer my apologies to the House, the shadow Minister, who is in his place, and Members who attended the debate. In handling this request, the NHS information centre did not treat this as a request for sensitive information.

Once again, I thank you, Mr Speaker, for affording me this opportunity and I apologise for the fact that my comments during the debate provided an incorrect impression of the actual events.

[Mr Speaker]

I am extremely grateful to the Minister for what she said. It does seem to constitute a most full apology to and an explanation for the benefit of the House. We will leave the matter there. [Interruption.] We will not have a “further to” I am afraid. This matter has been fully addressed. If Members have totally unrelated points of order on completely different subjects, we will hear from them—in other words, for the avoidance of doubt, on matters not appertaining to that which has just been said. The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) intends to embark on entirely new terrain.