Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that the National Institute of Health Research has adequate capacity to conduct clinical trials.

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) was funded by £1.06 billion in 2018/19 by the Department. This provides significant investment to support the United Kingdom’s clinical trials base.

The NIHR provides the support, expertise and facilities the National Health Service needs to undertake world-leading research including clinical trials.

The NIHR’s centres and facilities, including the NIHR Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs) and the NIHR’s Clinical Research Facilities across England, funded by £981 million over five years from 2017, undertake and support early translational medicine including clinical trials funded by industry (commercial contract and collaborative), public and charity research funders.

The NIHR Clinical Research Network (CRN) supports the delivery of clinical trials and other studies in the NHS to quality, time and target. These trials and other studies are funded by charities, other non-commercial funders, and the life sciences industry. The NIHR’s CRN provides world-class health service infrastructure, for example research support staff such as clinical research nurses; and research support services such as pharmacy, pathology and radiology, to support clinical research in the NHS in England. In 2017/18 the CRN recruited 725,333 participants into 4,901 clinical research studies.

The NIHR also provides funding to support the UK Clinical Research Collaboration Registered Clinical Trial Units. These specialist units support researchers in the design, conduct, analysis and publication of clinical trials and other well-designed studies.

Training in clinical trials is supported through a range of awards provided by the NIHR Academy to support people who are looking to start or advance a career in health research methodology, including clinical trial design.

In addition to the NIHR research Infrastructure in the NHS, the NIHR also has a range of research funding programmes, including the Health Technology Assessment programme, which provide research funding for clinical trials.

The UK is leading the way in improving clinical trials, undertaking novel and more efficient trial designs that will develop new medicines, diagnostics and medical devices for patients. A key role for NIHR is to ensure that we have the capacity to conduct innovative and complex clinical trial designs.