Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether identifiable data from HSA4 abortion notification forms will be stored in structured, searchable form within any Abortion Notification Service data-lake.

The Department requires that the new service being built to collect and process abortion data includes a secure location to store frozen data extracts, namely datasets that have been locked to prevent further modifications, that can be accessed by the Abortion Statistics Team to prepare statistical publications. The detailed technical approach is still being worked through.

The structure of the datasets is still to be finalised but will be stored in a structured format that supports the Statistics Team. Further information on data collection practices are available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/abortion-statistics-for-england-and-wales-2023/guide-to-abortion-statistics-england-and-wales-2023#data-collection-and-quality

Any access to identifiable data given will be based on a ‘least privilege’ access model, which means data access is limited to the minimum necessary for someone to carry out their prescribed duties.