You asked
Please disclose under FOI all correspondence including replies between UKSA officials - including the Office of Statistics Regulation and the Office of the National Statistician- with any officials at NHS Digital since 1 March 2021 to date regarding data sharing of GP patient information.
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request.
In order to ensure that we have fully answered your request, we would need to search across the email accounts of every member of staff who work in at least 6 business areas across the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), including staff who have moved on to other business areas or have left the organisation. This amounts to over 100 email accounts that would need to be searched, as well as numerous business databases, files, shared drives and personal workspaces for correspondence received or sent. The search would also need to encompass a wide range of possible search terms to ensure all relevant documents are found.
The cost limit for replying to a Freedom of Information request is £600 or 24-hours work, and in our view, we would need to greatly exceed this with your request. Therefore, Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is engaged, whereby a public authority is not obliged to answer a request if the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit.
Please see the following information and ONS publications regarding this topic, which may be of interest to you, as this provides further information about the topic of your request.
There are two different types of GP data that NHS Digital collect and that ONS officials have correspondended with NHS Digital about. The first is a dataset that was collected specifically in response to the pandemic. The other dataset is being collected for wider uses. NHS Digital publish information on these two datasets as follows, and they do have similar names so which is which is clearly indicated.
GPES data for Pandemic Planning and Research (GDPPR): This is the pandemic specific dataset and ONS already holds an extract of it to enable the production of COVID-19 statistics and ONS has been transparent about its use of these data.
General Practice Data for Planning and Research (GPDPR): This is the new stream of data that could be used for wider research purposes, and for which NHS Digital have paused collection. ONS do not hold an extract of it.
Please see the following links to some of our publications that have used the pandemic specific GP dataset:
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/updatingethniccontrastsindeathsinvolvingthecoronaviruscovid19englandandwales/24january2020to31march2021
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/news/news/ethnicdifferencesincoronaviruscovid19mortalityduringthefirsttwowavesofthepandemic
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsinvolvingcovid19byreligiousgroupengland/24january2020to28february2021
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/mentalhealth/bulletins/coronavirusandgpdiagnoseddepressioninengland2020/coronavirusandgpdiagnoseddepressioninengland2020
These all state which data sources are involved, including the GP data.
In addition, the following link provides information on the sources of personal information that ONS holds and uses for statistics, and the pandemic specific GP dataset is included:
You may wish to resubmit your request with a reduced scope, in order for us to be able to answer this within the cost limit. We would recommend reducing time scale of your FOI to a period of 3 months, as well as being more specific about who the communication is between. Any official is any person who works in the UKSA who has had correspondence with any person who works in NHS Digital. It may also help for you to distinguish which of the two types of data, detailed above, that you are interested in acquiring correspondence about. This will help to reduce the scope of the request.