Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the legal and reputational risks of NHS England’s decision to instruct hospitals to use Palantir’s Faster Data Flows database.

The Faster Data Flows pilot makes use of data infrastructure (Data Management Platform Services) already procured by NHS England. The pilot aims to collect data already submitted via legacy collection systems with an aim to reduce data latency and will not collect any data from providers which they are not already asked to provide.

The General Data Protection Regulation requires a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) to be completed by a data controller to demonstrate how they will comply with data protection law and in doing so identify and minimise data protection risks. NHS England and NHS Digital, as they existed separately at the relevant time, have produced DPIAs for the Faster Data Flows pilot.