Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether treatments for rare diseases approved under the Highly Specialised Technologies (HST) process would have been rejected under the new criteria introduced for the HST process in 2017.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has advised that prior to the revised methods for the development of highly specialised technology (HST) evaluation guidance being introduced in 2017, the HST programme did not have a cost-effectiveness framework to inform the consideration of value for money. Therefore it is not possible to confirm if those technologies that were evaluated before April 2017 would have been recommended under the new methods, because the key elements of the new methods were not established and were not considered by the committee in the context of the many other factors taken into account in the decision-making.