Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of steps taken by the Government to tackle barriers to accessing fertility treatment.

Funding decisions for health services in England are made by integrated care boards (ICBs) and are based on the clinical needs of their local population. We expect these organisations to commission fertility services in line with National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines, ensuring equal access to fertility treatment across England.

The Women’s Health Strategy was published on 20 July 2022 and contained several important changes and future ambitions to improve the variations in access to National Health Service-funded fertility services. We have set out our long-term ambition to end the postcode lottery in NHS-funded in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). NICE is currently reviewing the fertility guidelines and we expect the review to be published late in 2024.

We expect ICBs to be improving their broad offer to fertility patients in anticipation of implementing the new NICE guidelines. As part of the strategy’s commitments, NHS England will be assessing fertility provision across ICBs, with a view to removing non-clinical access criteria and assessing the challenge of implementing the new guidelines.

As part of the first-year commitments in the Women’s Health Strategy, the Government published an IVF transparency tool on GOV.UK in July 2023. This tool compiles published ICB policies on their local fertility treatment offer to keep track nationally of implementation progress and inform patients about comparative offers across ICBs.