British drug exports to the US will escape tariffs imposed by Donald Trump as part of a controversial UK-US medicines deal that critics fear will mean less money for the NHS.
The deal will also give patients in Britain greater access to potentially life-extending drugs because the rules have been relaxed to allow the NHS to pay more for particular treatments.
In an announcement on Thursday, the UK government highlighted the recent approval of two cancer medicines as representing good value for money and proof that its agreement with the US administration will benefit the very unwell, not just pharmaceutical firms.
They are now available because the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) from this week has increased the amount of money the NHS can spend on a treatment in the hope of giving patients a longer and higher quality of life from £30,000 to £35,000 a year.
Ministers, drug industry bosses and patient groups hailed the deal as good news. For example, it would let the £5bn of British-made drugs that are sold to the US every year avoid tariffs of up to 100% that the US president plans to put on some of the medicines being imported into the US.
The government described it as “a win for British patients, British businesses and the British economy”, because it will help protect the UK’s 50,000 pharmaceutical jobs and encourage drug companies to invest in research, development and production in the UK.
But the Liberal Democrats, a leading drugs expert and campaign groups voiced major scepticism. Keir Starmer’s willingness to pay more for medicines would lead to him “taking an axe to the NHS to pacify Donald Trump and big pharma’s demand for higher medicines prices”, the UK-based campaign group Global Justice Now warned.
The UK government has committed to doubling its spending on newly developed medicines from 0.3% of GDP to 0.6% of GDP by 2035 as a key element of the deal. Dr Andrew Hill, a drugs expert at University of Liverpool, has estimated that jump will cost the UK £9bn a year by 2035.
Hill said: “Why spend an extra £9bn a year on higher drug prices to protect drug exports to the US of only £5bn a year? The maths simply does not add up.” The £9bn would save more lives if it were instead spent on expanding existing services, he added.
Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrat health spokesperson, said: “Starmer must stand strong against the bully in the White House, and protect our health service as a matter of urgency. It is completely outrageous that Trump thinks he can get away with meddling in our NHS and even worse that Starmer refuses to stand up against him.
“Decisions over how to spend money in our NHS should be set by the British people, not by a foreign regime.”
The Lib Dems demanded that MPs should be allowed to scrutinise and vote on the deal, which has caused concern in many parties at Westminster since the outline of it first emerged last December, in particular because of the secrecy that has surrounded it, for example, over its true cost.
The government announced the final version of the UK-US “partnership” on drug pricing and access in a press release after 5pm on Thursday. However, the full text of the deal was only going to be made available on Thursday evening, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said, raising concerns about what the full details may show.
Tim Bierley, Global Justice Now’s policy and campaigns manager, said: “It has made this agreement without consulting parliament, confirmed it via press release with no full text, then snuck it out at the start of the Easter weekend.”
The first two drugs green-lit under the new pricing regime are for a type of faulty gene-related brain cancer that reduces the risk of the tumour progressing by 50% and a “last resort” treatment for a rare form of stomach cancer. Nice is now under pressure to approve other drugs it has previously deemed not to be a good use of NHS resources, including the breast cancer drug Enhertu.
