Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to support women with fertility problems.

The level of provision of local health services available to patients, including fertility treatment, is, and has been since the 1990s, a matter for local healthcare commissioners. Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have a statutory responsibility to commission healthcare services including fertility services that meet the needs of their whole population.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s guidance for commissioners is a new tool to help them implement the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) fertility guidelines.

The Government’s position is that CCGs should be following the NICE fertility guidelines as part of their National Health Service service offer to local people. On 17 June 2019, the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Mental Health, Inequalities and Suicide Prevention (Jackie Doyle-Price MP) wrote to the Chief Executives of all CCGs in England to promote the guidance and benchmark price, and strongly encourage them to implement the NICE fertility guidelines in full.