Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, for what reason the release of Pillar 2 local authorities was delayed.

All upper tier local authorities now have access to record level, including sex, age, occupation and postcode, test and case data. This data also includes individual case data across pillar 1, National Health Service and Public Health England (PHE) laboratories, and pillar 2, commercial laboratories, of the testing programme.

PHE has been routinely sharing data with Directors of Public Health to support outbreak management, including pillar 2 data. On 24 June, PHE started providing daily individual-level, test data, enabled through a data sharing agreement with Directors of Public Health. This contains additional information such as full postcode, age and ethnicity where available. Prior to this, there were dashboards made available by NHS Digital that included high level pillar 2 data to support local authorities.

Data sharing agreements of this type are complex and need robust information governance and protection protocols to safeguard people’s data. This data sharing process was developed as quickly as possible within this framework, to ensure accurate and regular data reporting to Directors of Public Health for both pillars of the testing programme.