Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that sufficient funding is available to provide drugs for Alzheimer's disease to patients.

The Government remains strongly committed to supporting research into dementia and the United Kingdom research community is playing a significant role in the global effort to find a cure or a major disease-modifying treatment by 2025.

The Government has doubled research spending on dementia, with a commitment to maintain this level of spending of at least £60 million a year to 2020, with an ambition for overall spending on research from all sectors to double by 2025. Much of this investment is in research to better understand the nature of dementia, to inform development of future treatments and ways to prevent the onset of the condition.

We will need to consider the potential impacts that new and emerging treatments for Alzheimer’s disease may have on the health system. We will engage with initiatives such as Alzheimer’s Research UK’s proposed Taskforce which seek to identify innovative and cooperative solutions for making available future medicines and diagnostic approaches for people living with dementia.