Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment with Cabinet colleagues of the potential impact of provisions in the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill on giving data controllers discretion to decide when personal data can be classified as anonymous on the privacy of patients with sensitive private health issues; and whether his Department plans to introduce safeguards to ensure that data controllers only reclassify data when it is correct to do so.

The UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 set out the conditions which apply to the processing of personal and special category data, which includes health data. The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill will not amend the classification of special category data or remove safeguards.