What does the UK’s Trusted Research Environment (TRE) landscape really look like in 2025, and what is beginning to change?
As part of our core mission, DARE UK regularly takes stock of the UK’s data research infrastructure ecosystem to understand how it is evolving, where pressures and opportunities lie, and how future investment and policy should be shaped.
Following landscape reviews in 2021 and 2023, early findings are now emerging from the 2025 Infrastructure Landscape Review survey, which ran from April to July this year, and the picture is both reassuring and revealing.
A UK-wide view of a diverse, maturing ecosystem
This year’s landscape review survey gathered 62 detailed responses spanning all four nations of the UK. These include 11 of 12 NHS England national and regional Secure Data Environments (SDEs), every member of the Scottish Safe Haven Network, and major national assets such as the Office for National Statistics, UK Data Service, UK Biobank, Our Future Health, SAIL Databank and Northern Ireland’s Honest Broker Service. Taken together, these responses provide a robust snapshot of the UK’s sensitive data research landscape.
Structurally, the ecosystem looks strikingly familiar. As in 2023, it is dominated by academic (40%) and public sector organisations (37%), with private, third sector and other providers making up the remainder. Most TREs continue to support up to 100 active projects each year, while a small but significant group now supports well over 250.
Across the sample, TREs collectively report around 5,600 active sensitive data projects annually. We consider this to be a conservative minimum estimate of UK-wide activity (the true scale is likely larger), which underscores the potential and importance of a national network of data research infrastructures.
Linkage remains a challenge
One of the more sobering early insights is that only around one in five projects (about 20%) currently involve cross-domain data linkage. Given the well-established potential of linked data to unlock richer insights, particularly in health, public services and social outcomes, this raises important questions about barriers, incentives and capabilities that the full review report will explore in more depth.
A decisive shift towards advanced computing
Perhaps the most eye-catching change since 2023 is the rapid growth in computational capability within TREs. More than half of UK TREs now provide access to high-performance computing, while access to GPU and AI-focused computing has surged dramatically, from under half of environments in 2023 to 70% today.
This marks a clear shift towards supporting more data-intensive and machine-learning-driven research, and this is reflected in the tools available to researchers. TREs are increasingly being equipped not just to store and protect sensitive data, but to enable cutting-edge analyses within secure settings.
Why this matters
These early findings suggest a UK TRE ecosystem that is stable in structure, growing in scale, and rapidly strengthening its technical capabilities, yet still facing persistent challenges around data linkage and interoperability.
As we continue to analyse the full survey results, these early findings can help spur conversations to inform strategic priorities and future investment to grow the UK TRE and broader data research community.
This is very much a first look. More detailed analysis and what it means for researchers, infrastructure providers and decision-makers will follow soon!
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