Charlotte Leslie – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Charlotte Leslie on 2014-06-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the statement on the What About Youth? website that approval has been received to use young people’s contact details from NHS registration data and the National Pupil Database, when that data was supplied; and on what register the decision to disclose that data was recorded.

Dr Daniel Poulter

On behalf of the Department, the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) has commissioned the “What about Youth?” trial survey to test the processes and methodology. It was carried out by Ipsos Mori and ran from November 2013 to February 2014. The trial survey was posted to just under 7,000 younger people using information obtained from the Medical Research Information Service Integrated Database and Administration System, approval for which was obtained on 15 August 2013 via the HSCIC Data Linkage and Extract Services application process:

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/dlesaac

The decision to approve the request for provision of an extract will be included in the next Data Release Register due in early July.

The National Pupil Database (NPD) is a Department for Education resource. HSCIC gained approval to use NPD data by applying via the formal process:

https://www.gov.uk/national-pupil-database-apply-for-a-data-extract#approval-process

and received approval to use NPD for the trial survey on 18 March 2014; however, this was too late for the trial and the data were not used. Ipsos Mori was granted access to the extract on 10 April. The decision to approve the request for provision of an extract is shown on row 139 of the “National pupil database: requests received” at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-pupil-database-requests-received