Health Bill

This is not a controversial clause, but one particular issue arises from it about information that might be sensitive, because it relates to named individuals. It might be patient information that is otherwise confidential. In Committee in another place the Minister, Jane Kennedy, said that the information required to be disclosed would only be that which was absolutely relevant and necessary for the case of fraud to be proven. On the face of it, that is reassuring. However, how is it possible to know in advance what information will be absolutely relevant and necessary? What you typically get in an anti-fraud operation is a scooping up of just about any piece of information that might possibly be of relevance. Only afterwards is there a sifting process that narrows down the information that is of central importance. I do not see how it is possible to give the guarantee that no irrelevant or unnecessary data, including confidential and sensitive data, will be disclosed. The second issue here is anonymisation. If sensitive patient data are anonymised, the risk of someone’s identity becoming apparent as a result of disclosure is clearly lessened very considerably. Anonymisation is a safeguard that should be automatic.  Again, we were led to understand from the debates in another place that it would be, but there does not appear to be anything in the Bill that says so. No doubt the Minister will tell me that this issue is best dealt with in guidance and procedural rules, but I wonder about that in view of subsection (6), which appears to give carte blanche to NHS bodies and service providers to ignore the rules of confidentiality altogether. I would find it more reassuring if subsection (6) were counterbalanced in some way by a provision that made it standard practice to anonymise data, other than in exceptional circumstances.