Extract from Commons consideration of Lords amendments to the Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill - March 15

The UK may also be seen as a hostile market, because it takes three to five years for cancer drugs to get into the NHS. As other doctors in this place will know, our patients face a delay in accessing new drugs, and anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. Pharmaceutical companies will simply think, “Well, we’re not going to get into the NHS for five years, so let’s go and do Australia and Canada. We’ll come back and deal with the UK later.” That delay to licensing in the UK would be a real problem, and it would extend to Scotland, too, because at the moment licensing is a UK-wide process. The drugs would therefore not be available to us outside the European Medicines Agency...

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