Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 17 July 2020 to Question 67635 on Coronavirus: Screening, whether (a) covid-19 and (b) other notifiable diseases require further data protection agreements to include post code notification.

Public Health England (PHE) routinely shares confidential patient information with Directors of Public Health to manage local infectious disease outbreaks. The sharing of record-level positive COVID-19 test results data, including postcodes, with local authorities is being managed by PHE under a data sharing contract to ensure that the data protection risks associated with this large-scale sharing of personal data are being managed appropriately.