LONDON — British lawmakers called on the U.K.’s spending watchdog to investigate how much the U.K.-U.S. drug pricing deal will cost taxpayers. Six U.K. parliamentary committee chairs sent a letter to the National Audit Office Wednesday arguing there is “significant public interest in understanding its implications for public expenditure,” after the U.K. government refused to release details of the costs of the deal agreed with the Trump administration. The deal — agreed in December last year — saw the U.K. commit to spending more on new medicines in exchange for three years of zero tariffs from the U.S. on pharmaceutical products.
The U.K. government agreed to double its pharma spending to 0.6% of GDP by 2035. It laid secondary legislation to update the rules used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, allowing the body to raise its cost-effectiveness threshold — the point at which it considers a medicine to provide sufficient value for money — by 25%. The U.K. government has so far refused to publish how much the deal will ultimately cost Britain's National Health Service.
Instead, it has estimated the agreement will cost approximately £1 billion over the current spending review period. Sally Gainsbury, senior policy analyst at independent health think tank Nuffield Trust, was previously refused access to the government's impact assessment of the deal. The Information Commissioner’s Office said the Department of Health and Social Care argued that releasing it would “prejudice ongoing policy development, international relations and commercial interests.” Gainsbury launched an appeal to the Information Tribunal on Aug. 17 over the government’s decision to withhold the assessment.
The case is due to be heard between December and February. Gainsbury said in comments that the trade deal will have "a huge negative impact on the NHS’s ability to improve the health of the population as it will divert resources away from much more cost-effective forms of care and towards much more expensive and often less certain treatments.” She added: “The government has said the deal is necessary to support economic growth, but it has not been prepared to reveal the details of its assessment on that. We shouldn’t have to go to court to get transparency on something so significant and impactful on our nation’s health services, but that is where we find ourselves.
This call, from no fewer than six parliamentary committee chairs, really underlines the strength of public interest in transparency and we hope the government is listening.” Signatories to the letter include Health and Social Committee Chair Layla Moran; Science, Innovation and Technology Committee Chair Chi Onwurah; Business and Trade Committee Chair Liam Byrne; Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Chair Tonia Antoniazzi; Scottish Affairs Committee Chair Patricia Ferguson; and Welsh Affairs Committee Chair Ruth Jones.
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