Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of which medicines should be prioritised for reshoring or nearshoring of manufacture, and what estimate they have made of the investment required to achieve this.

The Government is committed to strengthening the United Kingdom’s domestic medicines manufacturing capabilities, now and in the future, using a range of levers to support the sector more broadly.

The key lever, the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund (LSIMF), builds on the success of three previous grant funding schemes, which are on track to provide over £520 million in private investment in medicine manufacturing and secure over 1,900 high-skilled jobs. The fund provides capital grants to support UK-wide investment in human medicines, as well as medical diagnostics and medical technology products.

One of LSIMF’s core objectives, that applications to the fund are scored against, is to strengthen the UK’s manufacturing capacity and capability to increase health resilience, as well as increasing economic growth. We define health resilience as the UK’s ability to withstand and recover from health emergencies such as pandemics, long-term healthcare challenges, and system shocks such as supply chain disruption.

Support has been provided across the medicines sector, including large pharmaceutical manufacturers, contract development and manufacturing organisations and generic manufacturers. This has bolstered the UK’s capacity in critical areas such as active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing and fill-finish capability. We do not hold a prioritised list of medicines for reshoring or nearshoring.

In 2024, the Department, on behalf of the Government, joined the European Union’s Critical Medicines Alliance which seeks to enhance the security and resilience of critical medical supply chains, encouraging actions such as greater collaboration, diversification, and boosting manufacturing of key products and APIs via reshoring and nearshoring.