Aligning TRE Assurance Frameworks in the UK: A SATRE-Based Control Alignment Approach

Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are secure environments that allow researchers to work with sensitive data while protecting privacy, but in the UK they must comply with multiple overlapping assurance frameworks, creating duplication and uncertainty about what good governance means. This paper presents a practical solution by using SATRE (the Standard Architecture for Trusted Research Environments) as a common reference framework and mapping it against major UK assurance standards to show where requirements are equivalent. This control alignment approach helps TRE operators reuse existing evidence, gives data controllers clearer confidence in governance arrangements, and supports secure collaboration between organisations, reducing burden while strengthening trust and enabling greater public benefit from data.