UK Health Security Agency
UK health agency
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is a government agency responsible for all health security in England, and some reserved public health protection matters across the whole of the United Kingdom. It is an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care.
The UKHSA was established in April 2021, consolidating Public Health England's infectious disease control responsibilities (along with NHS Test and Trace and the Joint Biosecurity Centre) into a single body focused on health security and pandemic preparedness.
History
Formation
A new organisation, initially to be called the Centre for Health Protection, was proposed by Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in July 2020 to combine NHS Test and Trace, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and the health protection functions of Public Health England. Under the name of the National Institute for Health Protection, the organisation was established by Hancock on 18 August 2020 as a single leadership structure bringing together NHS Test and Trace, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and all of Public Health England. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the new organisation was not formally established until 1 April 2021, by which time it was called the UK Health Security Agency. It reports directly to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
Baroness Harding was the interim executive chair of the new organisation from 18 August 2020 to 7 May 2021. In 2022, the High Court found that her appointment to the position broke equalities legislation. She had been the chair of NHS Improvement since 2017, and at the time was head of the NHS Test and Trace programme, established in May 2020.
“UK Health Security Agency” enters the record as uK health agency. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Health, Security and Agency can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104336949. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 2020, 2022 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “UK Health Security Agency” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.