Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Government's response to the independent report by Lord O’Shaughnessy entitled Commercial clinical trials in the UK, published on 26 May 2023, what progress his Department has made towards rolling out Clinical Trials Acceleration Networks; and what budget he plans to allocate to support those networks.

The Government published the full response to the Lord O’Shaughnessy review on 22 November 2023.

The response sets out that Clinical Trial Acceleration Networks will be renamed Clinical Trial Delivery Accelerators, with two initial Accelerators designated in dementia and vaccines. Accelerators will work with trial sponsors and delivery teams to deliver studies in innovative ways that maximises efficiency and prioritises diversity in regions, setting and trials, and to place people, regardless of their background or community in the right trials, in the right place at the right time.

There is up to £20 million of funding to establish the dementia Accelerator and to support the pre-existing Vaccines Innovation Pathway to deliver functionality expected from an Accelerator. This funding was announced in May 2023 as part of the initial response to the O’Shaughnessy review.