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, what steps NHS England has taken to fill the gap left by the closure of the Commissioning Support Programme for those treatments that are awaiting review by the Clinical Priorities Advisory Group.

NHS England does not believe that the closure of the Commissioning Support Programme will leave a gap in the review of treatments.

The topics that would have been referred to the Commissioning Support Programme will now be routed to the appropriate appraisal programme, undertaken by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), except where there is a clear rationale not to do so. NICE expects to implement this expansion from April 2020. It will be in a position to start progressing topics through the NICE topic selection process from the summer of 2019.

All policy propositions relating to topics previously being supported in development through the Commissioning Support Programme have been handed over at the agreed stage as for all topics, post stakeholder testing. These are now being progressed though 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/

The voluntary scheme agreed between Department and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry on getting the best value and most effective medicines into use more quickly for branded medicines pricing and access was published in November 2018. The voluntary scheme started on 1 January 2019 and will be in place for five years until 2023.