Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how he plans to assess the performance of the scheme to design and test a new economic model for antibiotics as set out in the Government’s new Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy, published on 24 January 2019.

The aim of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of innovative models that pay companies for antimicrobials based primarily on a health technology assessment of their value to the National Health Service as opposed to the volumes sold.

It is likely that assessment of its performance will include agreement to a health technology assessment valuation framework, completed value assessments of two antimicrobial products and negotiation of a payment framework.

The project will be led by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and NHS England and we anticipate that it will launch within the next six months once they have established a central project team. From that point we expect that it will be 18 to 24 months before payments can be made and we can begin to monitor the products and their impact in use to inform the evaluation of the project.

The test will be evaluated thoroughly before considering wider change to purchasing policy to ensure that the NHS gets best value from its drug budget.

In addition, the United Kingdom Government will consider the project successful if it stimulates other countries to test models in their own domestic markets and together, sufficient incentives are in place to stimulate companies to increase investment in antimicrobial development.