Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, for what reason his Department does not provide regular reporting on the number of clinical trials underway by the NHS.

Regular reporting on clinical trials underway in the National Health Service is available via the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and NHS provider websites. The NIHR funds and supports a range of clinical trials underway in the NHS. The Department, which funds the NIHR, requires NHS providers with NIHR contracts to report quarterly on trial recruitment for all their clinical trials as part of the ‘Performance in Initiating and Delivering Clinical Research’ exercise. Providers’ performance data must also be published on their website. The NIHR publishes a comparison table showing the performance of all NHS organisations which submit information to the exercise and trend analyses.