Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will implement the recommendations in Breast Cancer Now’s Setting the bar too high report in (a) Yeovil constituency and (b) the country.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) makes recommendations on whether new medicines should be routinely funded by the National Health Service based on an assessment of their costs and benefits. NICE has processes in place to review its methods to ensure that they keep pace with best practice and are suitable for the evaluation of emerging new medicines.

NICE concluded a comprehensive review of the methods and processes it uses for health technology evaluations in January 2022, and introduced a number of changes that make its methods fairer, faster, and more consistent.

NICE’s board considered a review of the severity modifier at its public meeting on 25 September 2024, in light of its implementation to date, and concluded that it is operating as intended, so no change to the modifier is needed at the time.

NICE has no immediate plans to make further changes to its methods in response to the Breast Cancer Now report’s recommendations, but is monitoring the impact of the changes made following the methods review, and has committed to considering modular updates to its methods and processes in the future. NICE has also commissioned research to gather further evidence on societal preferences that will inform future methods reviews.