Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to support the Health Research Agency in its efforts to harmonise and streamline the regulation and governance of research in the NHS.

The Government remains committed to streamlining research approvals, and the Health Research Authority (HRA) is the organisation created to deliver this.

The Government is providing an increased investment of over £4.5 million to enable the HRA to take forward the first year of plans for a three year programme to deliver ‘HRA approval’. This is a key step in delivering the Plan for Growth objective of creating a unified approval process for health research. This funding means that the HRA will be able to reduce duplication and bureaucracy by incorporating assessments by National Health Service staff alongside the independent research ethics committee opinion, which will result in one application, one assessment and one approval for research in the NHS in England.

The HRA will be established as a non-departmental public body on 1 January 2015. This is intended to give it greater independence and stability with its role having been agreed by Parliament. The HRA will have a duty to issue guidance on good practice in research management and conduct and NHS trusts and foundation trusts will have a duty to have regard to that guidance. This will help make NHS research management more consistent and proportionate and streamline governance of research in the NHS.