Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many licence applications for medicinal cannabis have been received by the expert panel; and what the status is of those applications.

Government has announced an aim to reschedule cannabis in the autumn. This will enable specialist clinicians to legally prescribe cannabis-derived medicinal products to patients with an exceptional clinical need. In the interim the Expert Panel has been established to review applications from specialist clinicians who wish to prescribe specified cannabis derived medicinal products. For each application, the panel are looking for a specialist clinician to meet their criteria and show that there are exceptional clinical circumstances before recommending that a licence should be issued.

As of 06 September 2018 there have been forty four inquiries to the expert panel mailbox from members of the public, patients, doctors and press. The number of applications to the panel has been small there is a significant risk that even aggregate information disclosed about applications could be linked to personal details (made available through media reporting). Given that the Home Office has a duty to protect these individuals the actual number of applications cannot be disclosed.