NHS: Drugs
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled NHS patients and British businesses to benefit from historic changes to medicines access following pharmaceutical partnership with USA, published on 2 April 2026, what modelling his Department has undertaken of the long-term cost implications for the NHS of the changes to medicines access and pricing.
Answered by Dr Zubir Ahmed
The Department has already been clear that the estimated costs of the United Kingdom’s medicines pricing commitments are approximately £1 billion in England over the remaining three-years of the Spending Review. The final and longer-term costs of these changes will depend on future growth in spending on medicines.
This is not something that we can pre-empt at this time as it depends on which drugs come to market and which are assessed as approved for use on the National Health Service accordingly.
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