Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment has he made of the potential merits of increasing NICE's cost-effectiveness thresholds used to evaluate Highly Specialised Technologies for rare diseases.

There are currently no plans to increase the cost‑effectiveness threshold for the highly specialised technologies (HST) programme. The HST programme already operates at a much higher threshold than standard National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) technology appraisals, reflecting the challenges of bringing treatments for very rare conditions to market, and NICE has been able to recommend nearly all the treatments that have been evaluated through the HST programme for National Health Service use.