Blood Cancers

Debate between George Freeman and Clive Betts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[George Freeman]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reading my mind—not for the first time—because the next paragraph in my speech is about the cancer drugs fund and the accelerated access review. His intervention gives me a moment to highlight some of the important points that colleagues have made. The hon. Gentleman, who is something of a biomedical stalker of mine on these occasions, as he acknowledged—we rarely appear in this House other than together—was right to highlight the great work that Queen’s University Belfast does on blood cancers. He spoke with great passion about his father’s experience.

My hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) spoke about her experience as a haematologist in this field and about being involved on the frontline of research. That is another example of the power of having Members with a range of career backgrounds in the House. She brings great expertise to these matters.

The hon. Member for Coventry North East (Colleen Fletcher), who is vice-chair of the all-party group, made some important points about the CDF, to which I will return, and described the experience of her husband Ian. She asked whether I would meet the Anthony Nolan Trust; I will. I have already had several meetings with the trust and will continue to meet it, and when I do, I will pick up on the issues she mentioned relating to post-transplantation care in particular.

My hon. Friend the Member for Crawley spoke powerfully about his mother’s experience and made some really important points, not least about data and the importance of our harnessing it and generating a new model of appraisal. I will pick up on the latter point when I discuss the accelerated access review.

The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) discussed NICE and how important it is that we tackle the new landscape and make sure we are quicker and better at assessing new medicines. The hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington raised several important issues in a spirit of cross-party non-partisanship that I hugely welcome and appreciate.

I return to the cancer drugs fund. At the beginning of the previous Parliament, the Government, led by the Prime Minister, made the important commitment that we would put in place a cancer drugs fund to ensure that UK patients got access to the very latest cancer drug treatments. We did that in response to a number of high-profile cases in which NICE, applying its standard, one-size-fits-all quality-adjusted life year, had turned down cancer drugs, and patients were desperate for some hope, wanting the system to be responsive to their needs.

I am proud that we have made a total commitment of more than £1 billion to the cancer drugs fund and that we are continuing to invest each year, with more than £300 million put in this year. However, the system as it was originally set up has not proved to be sustainable, because of the pressure—inevitable pressure, in some ways, given the extraordinary explosion of our medical advances—put on it. If drug companies are turned down by NICE and there is a fund available for a post-NICE approval, the companies simply go to it and it has become over-subscribed.

NHS England has moved in the right direction by taking our funding commitment and repositioning the CDF as an early access and managed-access fund that examines more innovative drugs, ensures that they are provided to patients more quickly and makes sure that the data from that early access is allowed to inform the selection of the drugs that are adopted.

The truth is that breakthroughs in 21st century drug discovery and the rise of better targeted medicines are bringing huge benefits for patients but they also place huge pressure on our traditional models of assessment, adoption and reimbursement. With a rapidly ageing society and an explosion of new treatments, we cannot continue with the old model of one size fits all, with the NHS acting as a late procurer at a retail price of every drug. At the heart of my portfolio is a mission to unleash the power of the NHS as a research partner in bringing new drugs to market and getting a dividend—a discount—in return for that work.

We spend around £14 billion on medicines in the NHS every year and over £5.5 billion of that is spent on cancer drugs. The new generation of cancer therapies are incredibly exciting. The immunotherapies that we are seeing do not just delay death or grant patients a few extra months or years; they are cures for cancer. Those Daily Mail headlines that have been promising cures for cancers for more than 20 years are finally true. We now have cancer cures coming through, which profoundly changes the way that we will have to price drugs.

Let me say something about the accelerated access review, NICE and the CDF. At the heart of the accelerated access review is a commitment from the Government to consider whether and how we can better harness our extraordinary NHS assets as an integrated healthcare system to become a partner in the development of new therapies, so that instead of the industry treating the NHS as an increasingly pressurised retail-based consumer that struggles with this explosion of ever more expensive technology, we become a partner. Then, in return for sharing our clinical assets, for working with charities and the industry around our £1 billion-a-year National Institute for Health Research network, and for our leadership in genomics and informatics, we can pull innovation through more quickly for patients, share a data package and be the first place on Earth that companies want to come to in order to have their innovations assessed.

The accelerated access review has been examining a whole range of complex issues in this field and its report is waiting for a post-referendum slot to be published. I can assure Members that in the time that the review team has been preparing that report for publication, I have not been sitting around waiting for it; along with NHS England, I have been doing the preparatory work to be ready for it. Without in any way wanting to pre-empt the report, let me just share with colleagues some thoughts about where I think there is a huge degree of consensus between the Department of Health and NHS England on how we might be able to make some moves.

There are three key areas. First, in specialist commissioning, which deals with many rare diseases and rare cancers, the drugs are commissioned nationally through the Department of Health and NHS England. We want to see whether we can pull together that commissioning function into a more innovative procurement unit, to pull through and do some more innovative deals with industry in return for discounts—acceleration for discounts.

Secondly, we want to consider the NICE pathways through to NHS England and ask whether we can make it easier for innovators either to go through a series of much clearer NICE pathways or to go straight to NHS England and do pricing, discounting, acceleration and volume deals, as well making sure that we have an transparency and accountability framework so that people can see which parties in the ecosystem are fulfilling their mandate.

[Mr Clive Betts in the Chair]

The evidence from recent NICE approvals is encouraging. Many thousands of people have benefited from blood cancer drugs that NICE has recommended, such as bortezomib, ofatumumab and rituximab, and the evidence is that if we gather the data properly from the drugs that we approve, then we can use that as an intelligent health service to inform which drugs we adopt and pull through more quickly. If we get that right, the CDF in its reformatted position as a managed-access fund operating earlier in the system could become a powerful vehicle for an accelerated-access model of cancer drugs assessment. That will require some careful work on the NICE/NHS England framework, but we are doing that work right now, as we speak.

I will close, Mr Walker, by saying that—ah, Mr Walker has been replaced by you, Mr Betts.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Observant, Minister. [Laughter.]

[George Freeman]

That was achieved in an extraordinary manoeuvre, which was so seamless I did not even notice it happening over my left shoulder.

This summer, officials in the Department will work with the accelerated access review team and NHS England to try to strike a blow for an integrated healthcare innovation economy that makes best use of our budgets. Let me put it on the record that these are substantial budgets: we have committed an extra £10 billion a year to the NHS in 2020 and at the heart of that package is an extra commitment to new drugs worth £4 billion. Those are substantial sums, but we want to make sure that those funds are spent on getting the right drugs through to the right people quickly, and in return for that acceleration we will be able to get better discounts from the industry. I am confident that by bringing the CDF together with the accelerated access review, we will be able to deal with many of the issues that colleagues have raised this afternoon.

That brings me to the end of my comments. It only remains for me to thank hon. Members for raising these issues. I hope they can rest assured that I am committed to seeing these issues through and working with them in the days, weeks, months and—who knows?—years ahead.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I call Jim Shannon. You have two minutes to wind up.