Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government when they intend to start the pilot scheme to test a subscription model to fund the development of new antimicrobials, announced on 9 July.

The United Kingdom national action plan for antimicrobial resistance (AMR), published on 24 January, includes the commitment to lead the way in testing innovative models that pay companies for antibiotics based primarily on a health technology assessment of their value to the National Health Service, as opposed to the volumes used.

This project was formally launched by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and NHS England and NHS Improvement on 9 July.

A period of targeted engagement to secure stakeholder input into the development of key areas of the project, including the proposed approach for topic selection, the approach to evaluation, and the outline commercial model was launched on 9 July and concluded on 6 September 2019.

The next stages will involve the development of an evaluation framework and commercial model, selection of products to be included in the test and undertaking a value assessment for the selected products.

It is anticipated that payments will be implemented to companies from spring 2021 following commercial negotiation with companies.