The SafePod Network (SPN) is a new investment from the Economic and Social Research Council to provide an independent network of safe settings (known as SafePods®) that will provide the secure facilities and services for researchers to remotely access datasets from participating Data Centres across the UK.
For researchers, the major benefit of SafePods is that they will be able to have local access to their project datasets, without the need for long distance travel to a dedicated safe setting provided by a Data Centre.
A wealth of government datasets, as well as study and survey datasets will be available for secure access from SafePods. This will include new linked datasets created by Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) projects, such as the groundbreaking Data First programme at the Ministry of Justice, and most datasets held by the Office for National Statistics’ Secure Research Service, the UK Data Service and SAIL Databank.
Many researchers across South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) Universities are already working with the types of administrative and/or sensitive datasets that will be made available through SafePods, and interest in these is now further increasing due to the pandemic.
You can watch the webinar via the YouTube video, or, click here to access the PowerPoint presentation.

