Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of data protection laws in ensuring that legitimate complaints processes are dealt with effectively by health bodies.

The handling of patient complaints in the National Health Service is governed by the Local Authority Social Services and National Health Service Complaints (England) Regulations 2009. These regulations set out in law the minimum standards NHS organisations must adhere to in respect of their complaint handling arrangements.

There are strong protections in law to ensure that health and care information is used in a safe, secure, and legal way, and these must be observed in any complaints process. These include: the UK General Data Protection Regulation; the Data Protection Act 2018, which establishes a legal framework for processing personal information and keeping it secure, and for only using it for the purposes for which it was collected; the Human Rights Act 1998, which requires public bodies to respect the private life of an individual, including protecting any information held about them; and the common law duty of confidentiality.