Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she has had recent discussions with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency on its targets to reduce its licensing backlog of generic and biosimilar medicine applications.

Ministers receive regular updates on the performance of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. The agency is taking significant steps to assess licensing applications within the shortest time possible. It is working to reduce timelines by bringing in additional resources and developing processes that will result in significantly improved response times, while protecting patient safety. These changes are already resulting in improvements, and monthly performance figures are published online.