Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to achieve anonymisation where necessary of personal data provided to Palantir Technologies UK for COVID-19 analysis, in the light of research suggesting that health data cannot be effectively anonymised.
NHS England is the data controller for data processed in the NHS COVID-19 Data Store. Data is de-identified by National Health Service staff before the data is analysed on Palantir's platform. As such, no identifiable data is being accessed for modelling for NHS England. Data is only processed under instruction by NHS England and Palantir cannot use the data for its own purposes.
All data in the NHS COVID-19 Data Store is under NHS England and NHS Improvement’s control. All data held in the NHS COVID-19 Data Store remains under the control of the NHS at all times and is being processed in accordance with the law.