Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what process his Department used to decide that personally identifiable information collected by the NHS test and trace service on people with covid-19 symptoms is retained by Public Health England for 20 years.

Public Health England retains personal data for different lengths of time depending on the public health purpose. Longer-term retention is sometimes necessary to manage and monitor the long-term health impacts of serious public health threats such as COVID-19 and future currently unknown threats to the public’s health.