Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of pharmaceutical prices on clinical outcomes.

The National Health Service has a finite budget, and it is vital that it is allocated in a way that maximises benefits for all patients. The prices that companies charge for their medicines are an important consideration in determining whether they should be routinely funded by the NHS. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is the independent body that makes recommendations for the NHS on whether new medicines should be routinely funded based on an assessment of their costs, including the price that the company sets, and the clinical benefits that they bring to patients. In developing its recommendations, NICE evaluates medicines against a threshold that is used in determining whether a specified product is a clinically and a cost-effective use of the health budget compared to other potential uses of that budget.

The recently announced increase to the cost-effectiveness threshold will, alongside measures announced in the Life Sciences Sector Plan, increase both the speed and breadth of patient access to innovative medicines and encourage growth in United Kingdom based clinical trials.