Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) adults and (b) children received drugs provided free of charge to the NHS for compassionate reasons in each year from 2021 to 2026.

The information requested is not held centrally. Pharmaceutical companies can establish compassionate use or early access programmes through which medicines may be made available to National Health Service patients free of charge ahead of an NHS commissioning decision. Such schemes operate outside the established commissioning arrangements for medicines and neither the Department nor NHS England collects information on the number of patients receiving medicines through compassionate use schemes.