Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the causes of the time taken by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to process D150 applications.

Delays to the processing of marketing authorisation applications have resulted from a combination of factors, including implementation of new licensing pathways and the need to divert resource to deal with urgent and unforeseen public health issues like the COVID-19 pandemic. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is changing its assessment processes to speed up the processing of submitted applications. Resource issues are being addressed as a matter of priority with targeted recruitment. The MHRA is also implementing a new IT system to manage licensing applications and improve processing times.