Health: Hepatitis C

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, there is clearly a budgetary constraint. The noble Lord mentioned 220,000 people—I thought it was slightly less than that—and this drug costs many tens of thousands of pounds per treatment. Clearly, however much we would like to treat 220,000 people, it is just not feasible to do so. That is why we have NICE, which has produced its appraisals and said that, using its modelling, the number of people who need to be treated in the coming year is likely to be between 7,000 and 10,000, rising to 15,000 by 2021. However, I agree with the noble Lord that this interferon-free treatment is a massive improvement on previous treatments, with a very high cure rate.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a wonderful treatment, but what has happened is blatant rationing. The Minister says that it is down to money, but something has long puzzled me. The Government reached a five-year agreement with the pharmaceutical industry that any additional costs over a baseline plus inflation would be refunded by the industry and, every quarter, his department gets back millions of pounds from the drugs industry. So can he tell me why arbitrary limits are being placed at local level on the provision of new drugs? What is happening to that rebate money? Is it in fact going back to the Treasury and not the NHS? It is quite unnecessary for there to be this rationing.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I feel almost as if we are living on a different planet—of course there are going to be budgetary constraints. Some of these new drugs are hugely expensive. We have a good scheme—the PPRS scheme that the noble Lord referred to—which enables us to get rebates from big pharma, but some of these new drugs are extremely expensive. I cannot say what the exact cost is of this interferon-free treatment for hepatitis C, but I can tell the House that it is many tens of thousands of pounds for a treatment. There are 220,000 people who could benefit from this treatment, according to the noble Lord, Lord Patel—that means many billions of pounds. If we spend many billions on this particular drug, there are many billions that we will not be able to spend on mental health or in other parts of the NHS.