Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the return on investment from medical research into eye conditions.

Early in the pandemic a decision was taken to pause many of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded and supported studies to enable the research workforce to focus on delivering the nationally prioritised COVID-19 studies or enabling redeployment to frontline care where necessary. We have now entered a new phase of the pandemic: the NIHR is working towards the restoration of research funded and/or supported by the NIHR – including research on eye conditions.

The NIHR has awarded £48.3 million through its Programmes for research regarding eye conditions and has supported a further £97.9 million of research through its infrastructure between 2010/11 and 2018/19. UK Research and Innovation has funded £54.1 million on research regarding eye conditions between 2015/16 and 2019/20. The Department has not made an assessment of return on investment specifically from medical research into eye conditions.