NHS: Data

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Clement-Jones]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of compliance by the National Health Service with (1) the General Data Protection Regulation, (2) the Data Ethics Framework, and (3) the code of conduct for data-driven health and care technology, in relation to external providers.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are optimistic that thoughtful use of data can improve outcomes, but we are determined to protect the interests and rights of patients. That is why the Department of Health and Social Care has introduced a code of conduct based on the GDPR and the data ethics framework. Last year, we assessed the compliance of some external providers. Based on that information, NHSX is developing a new digital health technology standard against which NHS providers will be assessed, and enforcement will be by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that the Minister has been celebrating Data Protection Day today. We received very similar assurances during the passage of the Data Protection Bill but we now know that GP patient data is being sold by the Department of Health and Social Care’s Clinical Practice Research Datalink to major US pharma companies. We have the handing over of NHS health data to Amazon for nothing, it seems, and now O2, owned by Telefónica, has been given free access to NHS mental health records. What transparency is there about any of those transactions? What open assessment is there of the public benefit, the sources of the data, and the price, if any, paid by these pharma and tech companies? I hope the Minister accepts that, unless we get this right, we will massively lose public confidence in the NHS and its safeguarding of data.

[Lord Bethell]

I wish all noble Lords a happy Data Protection Day, and it is a wonderful day to celebrate it. On the questions raised by the noble Lord, I reassure the House that the Government are absolutely concerned about the interests of patients and patients’ concerns about their own data, but the frameworks that have been put in place by the Government guarantee both transparency and the confidentiality of the data. The data shared with Amazon is freely available. It is provided through an API to 2,000 firms and does not represent anything like the confidential data implied by the noble Lord. Regarding O2, the data has not left the servers of the Birmingham and Solihull trust and it is not being used outside the remit of the pilot arranged by that project.