No inherent objections to the use of health records for medical research. There are ways to anonymise, protect AND link records, as the SAIL project has shown. But a few observations come to mind at this point:

1. Research on large sets of anonymised NHS records has been taking place in the UK at least since the 1960s (Lester Gill PDF) 
2. The critical question in relation to medical records is who owns them. This development answers the question in a round about way - the government has primary ownership, not clinicians or patients. 
3. What research will be done? Research using large datasets has been talked about for many years, and has been conducted, especially in the US. Datasets are much easier to assemble than prospective sets of consented patients. But the nature of the dataset methodology makes it unclear that it produces genuinely new knowledge.
4. Pharmaceutical companies have worked with the NHS on anonymised datasets under the heading of practice audit. The general aim of these studies has been to increase prescribing rates of existing drugs.
5. The key area of development is personalised medicine. But this requires the collection of genomic information - a complex process requiring explicit patient consent being explored in the Stratified Medicine Programme
6. The political aspects of the decision being made here has some similarities to the previous Government's National Programme for IT.

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