Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether Northern Ireland will receive funding through the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia mission; and what her planned timetable for delivery of the mission is.

Spending and delivery plans for the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission are currently in development. The Dementia Mission Co-Chairs Hilary Evans and Professor Nadeem Sarwar have, and continue to, engage extensively across the sector to understand and develop the missions’ key aims, ensuring it addresses the challenges the sector faces and that patient voices are heard. This has informed the missions focus on three key pillars: biomarkers and experimental medicine; clinical trials infrastructure and innovation; and end-to-end implementation.

In March 2024, the Government hosted a roundtable and reception where charities, academics, investors, business leaders, and people with lived experience came together to further accelerate efforts to tackle this devastating illness, and to thank all those involved in supporting dementia research, including charities across the United Kingdom. This event made a series announcements, including: awarding a share of the £6 million of funding to 10 projects through Innovate UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) dementia biomarker tools competition; the appointment of Scott Mitchell as the People’s Champion for the Dementia Mission; the appointment of Dr Ruth McKernan CBE as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Neurodegeneration Initiative, which will be a public-private partnership delivering the mission's objectives around biomarkers, boosting the number and speed of clinical trials in dementia and neurodegeneration, and working with regulatory bodies around the implementation of new treatments; and the appointment of the Medicines Discovery Catapult as the delivery partner for the establishment of the Neurodegeneration Initiative. The Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission continues to develop its deliverables, and will announce further plans for their delivery in due course.