Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department has taken to implement the commitment in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s methods and processes review to accept a greater degree of uncertainty in the evaluation of innovative new health technologies, including emerging cell and gene therapies.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is an independent body and is responsible for the methods and processes that it uses in the development of its guidance. NICE made a number of changes to its health technology evaluation manual in January 2022 following a comprehensive review of its methods and processes, including to clarify its committees’ additional flexibility in considering uncertainty when evidence generation is difficult. NICE’s technology appraisal and highly specialised technology committees are now using the updated health technology evaluation manual for all new evaluations which began after 1 February 2022, including evaluations of cell and gene therapies.