Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of the time taken by integrated care boards to add new National Institute for Health and Care Excellence-recommended medicines to their formularies on the ability of NHS patients to access new treatments.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) makes recommendations for the National Health Service on whether new licensed medicines should be routinely funded by the NHS based on an assessment of their costs and benefits. The NHS in England is legally required to fund medicines recommended in a NICE technology appraisal, usually within three months of final guidance.

The NICE has published guidance on the adoption of medicines in local formularies which states that once a NICE technology appraisal recommends a medicine, it must be included in a local formulary within three months, providing it is clinically appropriate and relevant to the services provided by the organisation, or within 30 days for Early Access to Medicines Scheme medicines.

As part of the commitments made in the 2024 voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing, access and growth (2024 VPAG), NHS England agreed to the development of a local formulary national minimum dataset within the first half of the 2024 VPAG, to increase visibility of local variation in the implementation of NICE guidance, identify where variation in local formularies may be creating barriers to access, and to confirm to NHS England when a NICE recommended treatment has been placed on a local formulary.

NHS England also agreed to use the dataset to inform a report, which will be published no less frequently than annually, identifying unwarranted variation between national guidance and local formularies.