Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions his Department has had with NICE on the time taken to issue guidance once a marketing authorisation has been granted.

Departmental officials regularly meet with officials in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to discuss a range of issues, including the timescales for the development of guidance through its technology appraisal (TA) and highly specialised technology (HST) programmes.

Wherever possible, NICE aims to publish TA and HST guidance on new drugs and significant licence extensions within a few months of a drug receiving a marketing authorisation.

The new arrangements for the assessment and adoption of cancer drugs introduced in July 2016 mean that the NICE appraisal process now starts much earlier for newly referred drugs, with the aim of publishing draft guidance before drugs receive their licence, and then final guidance to be issued within 90 days of that.