Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he has made an assessment of the adequacy of NICE methodology in appraising innovative medicines for licensed for Alzheimer's Disease.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is responsible for the methods and processes it uses to develop recommendations on whether new medicines represent a clinically and cost-effective use of National Health Service resources. The NICE develops those methods and processes independently and in consultation with stakeholders.

The NICE keeps its methods and processes under review to ensure that they are fit for purpose and are appropriate to emerging new treatments, and has a Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Lab that enables the NICE to develop creative solutions to complex problems in HTA. The HTA Lab produced a report in November 2023 on issues and challenges in the evaluation of disease-modifying dementia treatments. The report concluded that the NICE’s current approach and methods are considered appropriate for evaluating these treatments.

The NICE has recently consulted on its draft guidance on the use of two new disease-modifying treatments for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The NICE’s guidance says that the benefits of these treatments are too small to justify the significant cost to the NHS. These are very difficult decisions to make, and it is right that they are taken independently on the basis of the available evidence of costs and benefits.