Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he is taking steps to allocate additional funding to the specialised drug budget to cater for technologies being developed for new rare disease patient groups.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) issues guidance for the National Health Service on whether drugs and other treatments represent an effective use of NHS resources through its technology appraisal and highly specialised technologies programmes, including drugs for patients with rare diseases.

NHS England and NHS Improvement will continue to fund new treatments, including for rare diseases, in accordance with NICE guidance.

Through the Early Access to Medicines Scheme, we are already making important drugs available to patients. So far around 1,500 patients have benefited from the scheme, which enables drugs to be used in clinical practice in parallel with later stages of the regulatory process.