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 affordability of medicines as a result of the redrafted WHO resolution entitled, Improving the transparency of markets for medicines, vaccines and other health-related technologies proposed by Italy on 29 April 2019.

The United Kingdom has a long-established and globally-recognised track record of assessing the price of new, innovative medicines by their clinical benefit and value, rather than by their development costs or international reference prices.

The UK will engage constructively with the talks at the World Health Assembly to achieve the best outcome for people here and globally, including in low and middle income countries. Pricing arrangements are the responsibility of Member States and are highly context specific, but the Department supports information sharing and mutual learning initiatives, where appropriate, in seeking to improve value for money for country procurement budgets.