HIV: Barriers to Treatment

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, one of the purposes of the Act promoted by my noble friend Lord Lansley was to remove the Secretary of State, and indeed politicians, from these very difficult clinical decisions. That decision will be made by NHS England, and we expect a positive decision to be made in the very near future.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, Ministers cannot evade their responsibility for the NHS in the end. NHS England is not a clinical body; it is a quango wholly owned by and wholly responsible to government. The decisions it has made have been purely about money, and it is continually endorsing crude rationing of services and the restriction of drugs. In the current agreement with the drug companies, the Minister’s Government have received nearly £2.5 billion back in rebates from those companies. Why on earth has his department allowed the Treasury effectively to ambush that money, instead of it being spent, as it should have been, on innovative new drugs for NHS patients?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord will agree that there is a clinically driven process, through the specialised commissioning groups and the clinical priorities group within NHS England, that attempts to look at all these drugs in an objective, clinical way. Surely it is better that these decisions on priorities should be made by clinicians acting in that way than by politicians, who are subject to all the pressures of which we are all only too well aware. Of course affordability is an issue in assessing whether a new drug should be commissioned; it always has been and always will be. The £2 billion, which the noble Lord has mentioned before and which I think comes from the PPRS, is taken into account when setting the overall budget for NHS England.