Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his department has considered the impact of NICE’s severity modifier, introduced in 2020, on NHS England’s access to innovative cancer medicines which were previously eligible under the end-of-life weighting.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is responsible for the methods and processes that it uses in the development of its recommendations. The severity modifier was introduced in January 2022 as part of a number of changes intended to make NICE’s methods fairer, faster and more consistent.

NICE carried out a review of the implementation of the severity modifier in September 2024 and found that it is operating as intended with a greater proportion of medicines recommended than under NICE’s previous methods. Since then, NICE has continued to monitor how the severity modifier is being applied. The latest figures include data from technology appraisals published up until the end of September 2025 and show that the proportion of positive decisions has increased since the severity modifier was implemented and since data was published in September 2024. 87.0% of decisions taken since the severity modifier was implemented, compared with 82.5% when the end-of-life modifier was being used. NICE is also recommending a greater proportion of new cancer treatments overall, 86.3% compared to 75.0%, and advanced cancer treatments specifically, 84.8% compared to 69.1%.

NICE has commissioned research to gather further evidence on societal preferences that will inform future methods reviews.