Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the need to expand the NHS’s capacity to conduct life-saving research in the context of the covid-19 pandemic.

The Department’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is supporting the National Health Service to deliver life-saving research through the Clinical Research Network (CRN) which provides the infrastructure that allows high-quality clinical research funded by charities, the life sciences industry and the public sector to be undertaken throughout the health and care system. There are currently 6,354 active studies on the NIHR CRN portfolio. As of 16 February 2020, 1,279,053 participants had been recruited to research studies in 2020/21, including 877,723 to urgent COVID-19 studies.