Today I am updating the House on plans to create a new Health Data Research Service and fast track the set-up of clinical trials to accelerate the development of the medicines and therapies of the future. These changes will improve patient care and help to make Britain the best place in the world for medical research.
We will invest up to £500 million to establish a new Health Data Research Service. This will improve access to data for medical research by providing a secure single access point, meaning a researcher does not have to navigate different systems or make multiple applications for information for the same project. This will unlock the power of NHS data to transform research and lead to breakthroughs that improve care for patients.
The Wellcome Trust will be the first charitable funder supporting this groundbreaking initiative, committing an additional £100 million towards its development. The service will be hosted for at least the first five years at the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, leveraging the campus’s world-class facilities and expertise.
We will involve the public as we design the service, building trust and understanding through transparent communication and discussion about how patient data is used to deliver health benefits to patients across the UK.
We will work closely with Wellcome and other stakeholders to ensure the successful implementation of a service that will drive faster research that benefits patients sooner.
This Government’s work to make the UK a world-leading destination for commercial interventional clinical trials also supports our clear focus on driving economic growth, alongside improving health outcomes for patients and the public.
We will also accelerate clinical trials and deliver radical improvement in regulatory, set-up and recruitment processes over the next year. This will help to bring down the time it takes to move from the trial being submitted for regulatory approval from over 250 days to 150 days.
We will do this by streamlining approval processes for clinical trials by moving to standardised contracts, with contracting undertaken by a single lead research site. We will reduce the unnecessary duplication of checks that can be best conducted centrally. We will publish NHS trust level set-up performance data for the first time, and continue to work with industry and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry to improve data on our metrics to compare our performance with international competitors.
We will also implement the new clinical trials regulatory framework announced in December 2024 by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, to speed up trial approvals and encourage innovation in trial design without compromising patient safety.
I will continue to keep Parliament updated on the progress of this work.
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