Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the timeline is for national procurement of non-invasive prenatal testing for Down's syndrome as recommended by the National Screening Committee in November 2016.

The United Kingdom National Screening Committee recommended a pragmatic approach to roll out non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) as part of an evaluation, to provide further information to ensure the full national implementation is optimised and safe. Ongoing monitoring and evaluation will mean that the test is rolled out across England in such a way that the screening programme can be altered if necessary in light of any real life findings.

The timeline for the procurement of NIPT for Down’s screening is now linked to the timeline that has been set for the procurement of genomic labs. Within that context, the planning assumptions are that NHS England will go live with the new genomic laboratory infrastructure in October 2018 and that as part of that process, NIPT will be included in the directory of tests to be made available.