Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to support the domestic (a) collection and (b) processing of (i) blood, (ii) plasma, (iii) cells and (iv) tissues.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) is responsible for blood services in England and also manages the NHS Organ Donor Register (ODR), which includes tissue donation for the supply of human tissue grafts for use in surgery. The Department provides Grant in Aid and seed funding to support NHSBT to grow and diversify donor bases, as well as its capacity to process collections.

Between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025, NHSBT met 99.9% of hospital demand for red cells from domestic collections; the remaining 0.01% of units were imported from other United Kingdom blood services.

The Department, NHSBT and NHS England worked together since 2021 to deliver an end-to-end domestic supply chain for plasma-based medicines, enabling UK plasma to be processed into lifesaving medications in specialist facilities in Europe. Since March 2025, this has increased self-sufficiency from 0% to 25% for immunoglobulins and from 0% to 80% for albumin.

The Department’s stem cell programme supports diverse recruitment of UK donors onto the UK Stem Cell Register. A global pool of donors is needed to cover the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) diversity of the population so NHSBT works with international stem cell registries to meet patient demand.

NHSBT works to encourage people to consider signing the ODR including during the upcoming Organ Donation Week between 22 and 26 September 2025. However, there is no mandate for National Health Service establishments to acquire tissue from NHSBT therefore they can acquire from other sources, such as non-UK tissue banks.