Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve data access and sharing arrangements between the Health and Social Care Information Centre and NHS England.

NHS England and NHS Digital (formerly the Health and Social Care Information Centre) work together to ensure the data required to operate the National Health Service is collected and made available where required.

NHS Digital shares data for secondary purposes with customers through its Data Access Request Service (DARS) and NHS England applies for data from NHS Digital through this service.

NHS Digital continues to deliver a significant programme of work to further improve the efficiency of this service and this includes:

- Delivering a more streamlined approvals process;

- Implementing revised governance in line with the Data Protection Act 2018;

- Increasing the number of datasets available through DARS; and

- Making datasets available through a new secure on-line service.