Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to increase funding for research into Parkinson's disease.

Government responsibility for delivering Parkinson’s disease research is shared between the Department of Health and Social Care, with research delivered by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, with research delivered via UK Research and Innovation.

The Government is strongly committed to supporting research into Parkinson’s disease to support prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care.

This includes, for example, the world’s largest clinical trial of treatments to slow or stop the progression of Parkinson’s disease, which opened for recruitment in October 2025. This trial aims to recruit 1,600 participants in its first phase from more than 40 hospitals across the United Kingdom. The £26 million EJS ACT-PD trial is co-funded by the NIHR, the Medical Research Council, and multiple Parkinson’s charities.

The NIHR is also investing £20 million over four years into the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI). The UK DRI, primarily funded by the Government, is partnering with Parkinson’s UK to establish a new £10 million research centre dedicated to better understanding the causes of Parkinson’s and finding new treatments.

As well as funding research itself, the Department of Health and Social Care invests significantly in research expertise and capacity, specialist facilities, support services, and collaborations to support and deliver research in England, known as NIHR infrastructure. NIHR infrastructure underpins research, enabling the country’s leading experts to develop and deliver high-quality translational, clinical and applied research, including research into Parkinson’s disease.

It is not the usual process of the NIHR to allocate funds for research into specific conditions. The NIHR welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health and care, including Parkinson’s disease. Our approach to funding research is through open and fair competition and peer review to ensure that the highest-quality proposals, most likely to deliver real impact for patients, are funded without imposing financial targets or limits.