Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, when NHS England will conclude its review of specialised service commissioning.

NHS England established the specialised commissioning taskforce to make some immediate improvements to the way in which NHS England commissions specialised services, and to put commissioning arrangements on a stronger footing for the longer-term. The task force is not conducting a complete review of specialised commissioning, although there are some aspects of this work which will require some specific services or arrangements to be reviewed. The life of the task force was originally three months running from May to July 2014; this has now been extended to the end of October 2014.

NHS England is bound to arrange the provision, to such extent as it considers necessary to meet all reasonable requirements, of those services that are prescribed in regulations for national commissioning by NHS England (SI 2012/2996, as amended). Any decisions made by NHS England on the national commissioning of prescribed specialised services are made within the statutory framework provided for by Ministers in accordance with the requirements laid down by Parliament in section 3B of the National Health Service Act 2006, as amended. Further information on the process for prescribing specialised services is contained in “Prescribed Specialised Services Advisory Group, Recommendations to Ministers, May 2014”. A copy has been placed in the Library and is available at:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/specialised-service-recommendations-to-ministers