Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure the validity of online evidence submitted to the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation Call for Evidence, including the verification methods for submissions.

The call for evidence only collects personal category data that is necessary to support its analysis and further our understanding of the experiences of different groups of women and families, in line with United Kingdom data protection proportionality principles. Individuals’ names or other identifiable information are not collected because they were not deemed necessary for analysis.

Surveys are hosted by SurveyOptic, who are monitoring their network for unusual spikes in activity and will flag anything unusual to the investigation team to prevent bots. Throughout the analysis process, responses that appear to be duplicative, whether identical or near identical, will be removed.