UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC): the national Trusted Research Environment for longitudinal research

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

February 17, 2025

Summary:

Introduction:

The UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC) is the national Trusted Research Environment (TRE) for the UK's longitudinal research community, supporting the UK's unparalleled collection of Longitudinal Population Studies (LPS). Initially set up as a COVID-19 research resource, UK LLC is now a generic database for any research for the public good.

Objectives:

UK LLC supports longitudinal research by providing record linkage and TRE services.

Methods:

The UK LLC partnership provides a secure analytics environment, a trusted third-party linkage processor and a comprehensive governance framework to minimise risks to participant confidentiality. UK LLC is ISO 27001 certified and accredited by the UK Statistics Authority as a processor under the Digital Economy Act. The active involvement by members of UK LLC's public involvement programme ensures UK LLC is acceptable to LPS participants and the wider public. All UK LPS are eligible for inclusion. Researchers can apply to access the TRE via an approach that fulfils the needs of the LPS, the linked data owners and includes a review by public contributors.

Results:

Twenty-two LPS have so far joined UK LLC. Where permissions allow, participants are linked to their National Health Service (NHS) England, NHS Wales and place-based records, with work ongoing to link to NHS Scotland and non-health administrative records, including Department for Work and Pensions and His Majesty's (HM) Revenue and Customs. UK LLC Explore allows potential researchers to discover the breadth of data available in the TRE. All applications are listed on UK LLC's publicly accessible Data Access Register.

Conclusions:

UK LLC enables researchers to interrogate pooled LPS participant data that are systematically linked to diverse records. UK LLC remains open to additional LPS joining the partnership and will increase the breadth of data to support the longitudinal research community and attract increasing numbers of researchers across multiple disciplines, government departments and industry.

Published in

International Journal of Population Data Science

Volume

Volume: 10

DOI

https://doi.org/10.23889/ijpds.v10i1.2468

ISSN

23994908

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

© The Authors

Open Access under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

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