Its establishment was confirmed by the UK government's coalition agreement in 2010,[1] and by the White Paper, Equity and excellence – Liberating the NHS.
It was closed to new drugs from October 2015 to 29 July 2016 in line with the recommendation of the independent Cancer Taskforce report, which called for urgent reform to put the CDF on a more sustainable footing.
[6] From July 2016 it became a "managed access" fund, paying for new drugs for a set period before they are definitively approved or rejected by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
Based on the size of their covered population, each strategic health authority in England was allocated fixed funds from a total £200 million per annum that was made available.
[12] The Financial Times attacked the fund in December 2014 as "a populist gesture that gives the impression of benefiting patients, but in fact rewards poor quality drugs while benefiting a handful of pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the taxpayer and the full range of NHS patients", complaining that it undermined the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
[13] James Le Fanu writing in The Daily Telegraph said "This mechanism for diverting taxpayers' money to enhance, to little or no purpose, the profits of Big Pharma might be more aptly named "the Drug Company Fund".
[17] Professor Karl Claxton, a health economist at the University of York, says that the fund should be scrapped because the money would be better used on 21,000 patients with heart, lung and gastro-intestinal diseases who are denied cost effective evidence based treatment,[18] arguing that the principal beneficiary of the fund is 'big pharma'.
The researchers studied the 47 treatments that were being funded by January 2015, of which only 18% met internationally recognised criteria for being deemed clinically beneficial.
[22] No usable data was collected on what happened to patients whose treatment was funded - such as measuring how long they lived, their quality of life or side-effects.
[23] After its July 2016 reform, Eifiona Wood and Dyfrig Hughes from the Centre for Health Economics and Medicines Evaluation at Bangor University criticised decisions made by NICE on Drugs financed by the Cancer Drugs Fund for their lack of transparency, with decisions being made without disclosing ICERs (Incremental cost-effectiveness ratio) or total spending.