Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many intellectual property licences the Department of Health and Social Care holds under contracts or terms of reference for (1) grants, (2) pre-procurement or proof of concept work, and (3) procurement; how many of those have sub-licensing rights; how many of those have resulted in sub-licensing; and how many of those sub-licences are for patents, and for which countries.

The standard contract terms and conditions that are in use by the Department and across the Government include intellectual property (IP) clauses which grant the buyer a licence to use the supplier’s IP in the context of receiving and benefiting from the deliverables being bought. These typically allow sub-licensing under certain conditions and restrictions designed to avoid unfair exploitation of supplier IP. Standard terms and conditions are available on the GOV.UK website.

Such terms and conditions also allow for the buyer to publish any new IP rights as open licence under the Government’s standard open licence.

The Department may also obtain licenses from external supplier/organisations to utilise their IP. An example of this is the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP), which is a licensed program developed and owned by the University of Colorado Denver. The Department and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) have entered into a licence to deliver the program in the United Kingdom, and OHID is authorised to sub-license the FNP program to other organisations.

The Department’s grant funding agreements may include IP clauses where outputs are expected, but the intellectual property is usually retained by the grant recipient, with the Department granted a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use any arising IP for public benefit.

The Department currently has 474 active contracts and 31 active grants. Finding instances of active sub-licensing of IP would involve manual searches of the information held for each of these cases, and would only be obtained at disproportionate cost.