Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that changes to NICE’s cost effectiveness thresholds results in improved and equitable access to new and effective treatments for people with incurable secondary breast cancer.

The Government intends to increase the standard cost-effectiveness threshold that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) uses in its evaluations of medicines in line with the commitment in the United Kingdon and United States’ trade deal. The new threshold is expected to mean that NICE is able to recommend some medicines for use on the National Health Service that it would not have otherwise been able to recommend. Decisions on whether an individual medicine can be recommended as a clinically and cost-effective use of NHS resources once the new threshold is applied will be taken by NICE in line with its established processes.