Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what (a) encryption key management protocols and (b) physical hosting zones are in place to ensure NHS datasets remain (i) logically and (ii) geographically partitioned from Palantir’s multi-tenant infrastructure.

Access to National Health Service health and social care data within the Federated Data Platform (FDP) is tightly controlled. The FDP incorporates advanced Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET), which has been procured from a separate supplier to ensure independence and to mitigate any conflicts of interest.

It is a contractual requirement that personal data stored in the FDP and NHS PET cannot be accessed by its own personnel or contractors from outside the United Kingdom. In accordance with General Data Protection Regulation principles of transparency and accountability, NHS England has published details in the FDP Information Governance Framework. This framework is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/federated-data-platform-information-governance-framework/