The UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration: the UK’s national Trusted Research Environment for the longitudinal research community.

The UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (LLC) is the national Trusted Research Environment (TRE) for the centralised curation and integration of UK Longitudinal Population Studies’ (LPS) data and the systematic linkage of participants’ routine health, administrative and environmental records. Our objective is to realise new scientific opportunities by creating new combinations of data, to provide efficient access to well curated data and to provide meaningful public safeguards with full transparency of data use.

LLC is a secure TRE hosting LPS and linked data within a remotely accessible analysis platform (provided by SeRP). Approved users can analyse integrated individual-level data within a strict governance framework co-developed with LPS data managers and public contributors. LLC has adopted the “five safes” decision-making principles to effectively balance curation requirements (e.g., data citation, processing transparency), security requirements (e.g., de-identification, minimisation and permission management) and efficient and predictable access routes to individual level data.

LLC hosts data from >20 partner LPS with >320,000 participants. Centralised data pipelines link participants’ NHS health records (primary, secondary and mental health care; prescriptions; mortality and disease registers) and socio-economic records (tax; work and pensions; education). Participant address data is being geo-coded to link environmental, neighbourhood and property data. Our design supports long-term sustainability, linkage accuracy and the ability to link data at both an individual and household level.

Through establishing LLC as a connected and centralised TRE, the UK’s interdisciplinary longitudinal community have “bridged the oceans” that separated LPS data and diverse linked data; “harboured” these sensitive data in a protected and trustworthy environment, and created a data foundation which “anchors the future” for research into priority cross-cutting questions relating to ingrained health and social inequalities, and health-social-environmental interactions, e.g., those driven by climate change. This model extends to federated analysis with international equivalents to enable research at a global scale.