Between May 2013 and February 2016 a heated argument took place between Kingsley Manning, the chair of the Health and Social Care Information Centre (now called NHS Digital) on the one hand, and the Home Office and the Department of Health on the other. At stake was the HSCIC’s independence as an Executive Non-Departmental Body responsible to parliament, not to any minister, and its trustworthiness as the guardian of the personal details of every NHS patient in England.
After his appointment as chair in May 2013 Manning discovered that since at least 2005 the HSCIC and its predecessor, the NHS Information Centre, had been giving details of patients’ present and past addresses and GP registrations to the Home Office, to enable it to trace and deport people who were living in Britain without the right to do so. This appeared clearly to be in breach of the HSCIC’s ‘statutory duty to ensure that the information we hold in trust for the public is always kept safe, secure and private’. But the Home Office, supported by the Department of Health, insisted that tracing ‘illegal immigrants’ was a public interest that overrode any other. The outcome was a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NHS Digital, the Department of Health and the Home Office, which specifies that NHS Digital will hand over the information requested by the Home Office for patients who have ‘breached s.24 of the Immigration Act 1971’, if all other ‘reasonable avenues’ (such as the Department of Work and Pensions and the DVLA) have been exhausted. The memorandum came into effect on 1 January this year.
