Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 2 April 2019 to Question 236381 on Clinical Priorities Advisory Group, what steps NHS England has taken to ensure that treatments awaiting review by the Clinical Priorities Advisory Group are not delayed by the closure of the Commissioning Support Programme.

Following agreement with the Department and industry as part of the 2019 Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing and Access (voluntary scheme), the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is now expected to undertake appropriate appraisal for all new active substances in their first indication, and extensions to their Marketing Authorisation to add a significant new therapeutic indication, except where there is a clear rationale not to do so. NICE expects to implement this expansion from April 2020. They will be in a position to start progressing topics through the NICE topic selection process from the summer of 2019.

The topics that would have been referred to the Commissioning Support Programme will now be routed to the appropriate appraisal programme instead.

Furthermore, NHS England advises that all policy propositions that were previously being developed by the Commissioning Support Programme have been handed over to the relevant committee, to bring them in line with the usual development process. This process is set out in ‘Methods: National Clinical Policies’ at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/methods-national-clinical-policies/