NHS Data: 24 hours to get transparency!

4 June 2020 — Open Democracy

There’s been an urgent development in our campaign to stop the secrecy about NHS data deals with private companies. The government now says they’ll make the decision “imminently” on how much detail they’ll disclose. It could be as soon as tomorrow.

The government is only doing this thanks to massive public pressure – from you and almost 12,000 others who’ve been demanding transparency. Thank you for being a part of this! The government wanted to brush this whole issue under the carpet. Now, thanks to everything we’ve done together, it seems they’re going to release some details of these shady deals.

But they are still deciding whether it’s a full disclosure, or another attempt at a cover up to suit the commercial interests of the murky companies they’ve got involved. We’ve now got 24 hours to ramp up the pressure for all the relevant information to be revealed.

Can you help up the pressure further, today, by asking your friends to sign up too?

Please ask your friends to sign, by forwarding this email and asking them to click this link.

More pressure today will send them a powerful signal – we won’t settle for less than total transparency. We can make it clear that if they try a token release of information which dodges the key questions, we’ll take them to court.

The COVID-19 datastore will hold sensitive, personal NHS health data on every single one of us. To deliver it, the government has signed secret deals with US tech giants like Amazon Web Services – and firms whose bosses have personal links to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Without the right safeguards, it could be the biggest handover of NHS data to private firms in history. And if the safeguards are all in place, why won’t the government just publish them?

Foxglove is dedicated to making sure digital technology works for everyone – and to challenging the abuse of power by giant tech companies. openDemocracy’s journalists have a proud history of exposing attempts to privatise the NHS, and of winning fights for government transparency.

Foxglove and openDemocracy will be back in touch ASAP to let you know when the government makes its release – including our analysis of what they’ve revealed and whether it’s good enough.

Thank you so much for your support,