UK Biobank Data

Lord Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

This is somewhat off topic. In terms of China, I think it is very clear that there are three possibilities for where Covid came from. One is that it was a natural infection that spilled over from bats, with billions of chances for that to happen. The second is that an infection was taken into a lab and there was a lab leak at some point. The third is that it was designed in some way. I think that the last of those is very unlikely indeed, and that is what most people think. We cannot really distinguish between the first two by any other way than biosecurity services.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply on the Statement, and I commend the Government for taking immediate action when this data breach was known. Last Tuesday, the Science and Technology Committee took evidence from the chief executive of UK Biobank, and some of the issues brought out today about data security were brought out then. Two days later, we got the news about the Chinese data breach. The lessons here are about public confidence in other research. The Minister referred to the Health Data Research Service that will soon be established and the Genomics England data. Can he assure us that the public can have confidence that those two organisations sharing their data will be secure and that the Government will issue new guidance to every organisation that will use health data for research purposes?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I can absolutely assure the noble Lord that the Government will issue guidance. That guidance was in development anyway, and I expect it to come out within the next few weeks. I can also assure him that other platforms use secure data platforms where the downloading of data is not possible. There was a rather unusual situation with UK Biobank where the data was downloadable, which is not true for many others. We absolutely need to use this to build confidence that these data are properly looked after and used for the purposes for which they were given.