New service passes Government Digital Service Alpha assessment
We are pleased to confirm that the new service has successfully passed its Government Digital Service (GDS) Alpha assessment.
This is a significant milestone for the programme and enables the service to move into the Beta phase of development.
The assessment reviewed the service against the GOV.UK Service Standard and recognised the progress made in understanding user needs, testing service concepts and developing early prototypes.
Moving into Beta
The programme has now begun the Beta phase.
During this stage we will:
Service development continues
The delivery team and our delivery partner, Marvell Consulting, continue to make progress across several areas, including:
Taxonomy and health topics development
Work has continued on developing the public health taxonomy and topic structure that will underpin the new service.
The taxonomy will help users discover related indicators and information more easily, supporting navigation and search across the service.
More opportunities to get involved
Engagement with stakeholders and users will continue to expand over the coming months.
Planned activities include:
Your feedback remains an important part of the programme and will help ensure the service delivers meaningful benefits for the public health community.
Update on the new service for public health data
In our last update, we let you know that working groups had begun to meet to begin developing a new service for public health data.
In March 2026, suppliers were appointed to work on the new service, and a delivery group has been created to work with the suppliers in delivering the new service while ensuring that we maintain strong collaboration with contributors and users of the service. The suppliers have already made progress in setting up the alpha phase of the service; foundational work has been completed including data audit and architecture analysis, and identification of improvements to data structure to enable more effective use.
The next phase will make use of user research to support design and architecture decisions, and the developers will be seeking real user needs from the users of the data. Register your interest if you’d like to be involved.
To allow the team behind Fingertips to spend more time on the transition to the new data service, the profile feedback mailbox will now no longer be monitored. Instead, you can reach out for support through other routes:
Update on the new service for public health data:
We let you know in December that the technology that runs Fingertips requires updating so the service can run reliably, securely and follow best practice in government digital and data standards.
Work has now begun on creating a new service for public health data that will be available on GOV.UK and will be more secure and more reliable. A number of working groups have now begun to meet, focusing on:
• Data scope and ownership
• API and backend development
• Data architecture
• Front end and user interface
• Communications
• Service operations
• Publication
• Content management
Further updates will be shared regularly during the project to tell you what's happening and when to expect developments. We will be seeking your feedback regularly to make sure the new service meets user needs, and we will also guide you through the transition when the service becomes available. To make sure you’re keeping up to date with the latest developments, keep an eye on this page.
Please be reassured that until the new service launches, health statistics will still be published on Fingertips and the site will continue to be maintained.
Update on the Fingertips platform:
We know that there have been technical issues with the Fingertips platform over the last few months. Recently the Fingertips team have:
What's happening next:
The technology that runs Fingertips requires updating so the service can run reliably, securely and follow best practice in government digital and data standards. To address this, we are working towards creating a new service for public health data.
The new public health data service will be available on GOV.UK. This new service will be more secure and more reliable. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who signed up for our user research through the website survey and shared their time and insights over the last few months. Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us identify what’s working well, where the challenges lie, and what improvements will make the biggest difference. The findings from this research are already shaping our design of the new public health data service. Your contributions are helping us better understand user needs and requirements as well as make the new platform clearer, more accessible, and responsive.
What this means for you:
Updates will be shared regularly during this transition to tell you what's happening and when to expect developments. We will also provide guidance to help you make the switch. We will be seeking your feedback regularly to make sure the new service meets user needs.
Please be reassured that until the new service launches, health statistics will still be published on Fingertips and the site will continue to be maintained.
