Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 9 July 2025 to Question 64681 on Prostate Cancer: Hormone Treatments, for what reason recurrent headroom in revenue budgets is considered a barrier to implementing the abiraterone acetate plus prednisone/prednisolone treatment.

Reimbursement of abiraterone across all indications is managed at a national level by NHS England who must ensure the affordability of introducing any new routine commissioning policies, alongside maintaining existing services for patients and meeting their legal requirement to fund all National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended medicines.

Abiraterone has not been licensed for the treatment of high-risk, hormone sensitive, non-metastatic prostate cancer, and has not been assessed by NICE in this indication. NHS England therefore enabled a clinically-led review of the treatment in this indication determining it to be the highest priority for routine commissioning, and intends to commission the treatment for eligible patients as soon as recurrent funding is identified.