Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Life Sciences Sector Deal 2, what recent progress the Government has made on strengthening the UK environment for clinical trials.

We have established five national Patient Recruitment Centres dedicated to the delivery of late-phase commercial research and launched the Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway to support all stages of trial design development and approval, enhanced capability to deliver innovative trials and improved approvals and set-up times for studies.

In March 2021, the Government published ‘The Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery’, setting out a vision to build a patient-centred, pro-innovation and digitally-enabled clinical research environment. This was followed by an implementation plan for 2021/2022.