Britain risks losing access to the world’s best drugs, warns AstraZeneca

Sir Pascal Soriot says NHS could be forced to rely on cheaper and older medicines without reform - Saul Loeb/Getty

NHS patients risk losing access to the world’s best medicines unless the UK spends more on developing new treatments, the head of Britain’s largest drug group has warned.

Sir Pascal Soriot, chief executive of Astrazeneca, said the NHS could be forced to rely on cheaper, older medicines unless the Government changes course and spends more on developing new treatments.

Countries including the UK risked only being “able to afford generics” in the future if they continued to squeeze spending on innovative medicines, he said.

Generics are older drugs which are less cutting-edge, but have fallen off patent and so can be made more cheaply.

Sir Pascal said Britain was “hitting the bottom” in terms of its budget for medicines.

Currently, the UK spends around 9pc of its overall healthcare budget on branded medicines. Of that, only 7pc is spent on innovative medicines. It means the UK significantly lags other G7 countries.

The UK’s expenditure on new innovative medicines currently stands at just 0.28pc of GDP – around a third of the United States’s proportionate spending of 0.78pc of GDP.

“How low can you go?” Sir Pascal said. “Technologies are going to the US and they’re going to China and other parts of the world, so in 15 or 20 years, Europe could easily lose its health sovereignty.”

It will add to pressure on the Government after a wave of drug companies recently scrapped UK investments, citing unattractive NHS clawbacks and access to patients.

AstraZeneca earlier this year paused a £200m investment that would have expanded its research and development operations in Cambridge and drug bosses have argued that the UK is now “uninvestable”.

In September, Lord Vallance, the science minister, admitted that the NHS would have to spend more on new medicines to stop a wave of investment leaving Britain.

However, reports have suggested that the Treasury is reluctant to agree to a larger overall budget, pushing for any increase to be funded out of the existing allotted departmental cash.

Sir Keir Starmer has recently intervened in the row, with plans to overhaul a decades-old formula used to determine whether medicines are deemed value for money. In theory, this could allow the NHS to buy billions of pounds more in new drugs.

However, Sir Pascal said the Government also needed to reduce the size of NHS medicine clawbacks – or drug makers would be forced to pay more in NHS rebates in response to the rising medicine spend.

He said: “Ultimately, if you get a better price and then a year later, a big [rebate] rate, it doesn’t really help anything.”

Story Continues

It follows mounting pressure on Labour to offer a better drug pricing deal to pharmaceutical companies.

Earlier this week, Warren Stephens, the US ambassador, warned that more drug firms “will not only cancel future investments, they will shut down their facilities in the UK” if ministers did not quickly change drug prices.

He said: “This would be a major blow to a country that prides itself, rightly so, on its life sciences sector.”

View Comments