UKRI trusted and connected Data and Analytics Research Environments, Phase 1

Researchers are asking thousands of scientists, data controllers, and members of the public across the UK what they need from a national system for sharing sensitive data. This project is a scoping and design phase. It does not build anything yet. Instead, it tackles a fundamental problem: the UK has many separate data repositories and analytics platforms, but they cannot easily connect or share data securely. Researchers working on health, climate, or social policy often cannot combine datasets held in different places because the technical standards, security rules, and governance frameworks do not align. This phase will gather detailed requirements from the research community and co-design the technical standards, federation protocols, and accreditation frameworks needed to link these environments. If successful, this work will produce a blueprint for a trusted, connected network of data and analytics research environments across the UK. That network could eventually allow researchers to combine health records, environmental data, and socioeconomic data at scale while maintaining public trust and data security. The immediate output is not a working system but the specifications and governance models that would make one possible. This is fundamental infrastructure work—the kind of invisible scaffolding that determines whether large-scale data-driven research can happen at all.