Coronavirus: Disease Control

(asked on 20th May 2020) - View Source

Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, on which dates data on people who are medically extremely vulnerable to covid-19 and should therefore be shielded has been provided to local authorities; and the details of how many individuals were provided on each occasion.


Answered by
Chloe Smith Portrait
Chloe Smith
This question was answered on 2nd June 2020

The Government Digital Service (GDS) - acting as the data controller for the shielded patient list (SPL) (ie persons who are medically extremely vulnerable to covid-19), as supplied by the NHS - has provided data of individuals on this list to local authorities. GDS initially provided data from the ‘registered list’ to local authorities in late March. From 2 April GDS provided the entire SPL, which was updated by the NHS on 9 April and 6 May, and then on a rolling basis.

Individual local authorities are only able to access SPL records where the postcode matches their relevant area.

The number of NHS SPL individuals was 2,232,175 as at 26 May 2020 and the number of 'registered list' individuals was 1,190,213 as at 26 May 2020. Note that the ‘registered list’ is broadly a subset of the SPL, not additional to it.

Reticulating Splines