On June 1 patient-led campaign group Just Treatment, and social justice organisation, Global Justice Now (GJN) issued a legal challenge to the government implementing its toxic deal on pharmaceuticals that concedes vital ground to President Trump and the giant US pharma corporations.
The campaigners are aiming to block changes to the NHS’s price control mechanism, arguing the changes could end up costing the NHS an extra £9 billion. The changes have not even been debated by MPs, while the government refuses to publish its assessment of their impact.
Just Treatment and GJN have written to the UK Government setting out why they believe the government has acted unlawfully in pushing through the changes to the NHS’ drug price control frameworks. This is the first stage of a legal challenge to a central pillar of the US-UK trade deal on pharmaceuticals.
A statutory instrument, which passed into law in April, has given ministers direct control over the key cost-effectiveness threshold the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) uses to determine which medicines are made routinely available on the NHS.
This change enables the government to deliver on the promises made to Donald Trump under the trade deal on pharmaceuticals announced in December 2025. It is part of a package of changes that would commit the UK to dramatically increasing NHS spending on patented medicines over the next ten years.
This is quite the opposite of the rosy picture of a US-UK pharmaceutical partnership painted by the government in the official press release announcing the changes, which insisted that the deal meant:
“The UK is the first country in the world to secure commitment to 0% tariffs on pharmaceutical exports to the US … [and] will benefit from greater life sciences industry investment and highly skilled manufacturing jobs will be safeguarded.
“Thousands of NHS patients will get improved access to life-changing treatments….
“UK pharmaceutical exports to the US — worth at least £5 billion a year — will enter the United States completely tariff free, for at least 3 years.”
The letter to the government sent on behalf of the two campaigns argues that the changes are unlawful, and asks the government to revoke the legislation – or face a court battle to reverse the changes. The claimants believe that the changes effectively end NICE’s independence from political interference, leaving medicine prices subject to political lobbying by Big Pharma corporations and the US government.
They say this poses an existential risk to the UK’s careful framework of safeguards designed to protect patients and the NHS from the excessive pricing demands of the industry. Changes the government has committed to under the Trump deal are estimated to cost the NHS billions of pounds a year by 2035, and have been widely criticised by health experts.
Diarmaid McDonald, Director of Just Treatment said:
“The government caved in to threats from Donald Trump and the pharmaceutical industry and signed a deal that experts say could cost the lives of over 300,000 NHS patients. That’s more excess deaths than COVID. Worse still, they’ve refused to publish their own assessments of the damage the deal will do to the NHS, and they’ve used a parliamentary process designed to make it extremely difficult for MPs to properly scrutinise what they are up to. But we believe the process they have followed is unlawful, and we are ready to take them to court to defend NHS patients and our democracy.”
Nick Dearden, Director of Global Justice Now said:
“This is a government gambling with NHS patients’ lives in a geo-political game with Donald Trump. They risk sabotaging our carefully worked out mechanism for keeping a lid on Big Pharma’s overinflated prices, and they have done so without so much as a debate in parliament.”
Some MPs have been trying to force a public debate on these changes; however, the mechanism the government used to enact them – known as a negative statutory instrument – is designed to make that kind of independent scrutiny almost impossible. Nonetheless, MPs and peers from Labour, Conservatives, SNP, Lib Dems, Greens, and Plaid Cymru – as well as two cross-party committees –have raised concerns.
NICE was established to make decisions on the effectiveness and affordability of medicines and treatments that would be independent of ministerial control, and based on evidence, not political influence.
However, the deal the UK signed with Trump included commitments to relax the cost-effectiveness thresholds it uses to determine if medicines are deemed to be ‘good value for money,’ and so made available for use on the NHS.
John McDonnell MP has been leading parliamentary efforts to secure scrutiny of the US-UK trade deal and has tabled a motion opposing the legislation enacting changes to NICE. He said:
“The government … won’t publish anything to evidence their claims, and they won’t enable time for proper parliamentary debate on this. It is an extremely dangerous precedent and I hope the government backs down or the courts re-establish the democratic principles our parliament relies upon.”
At the end of May, Lord Stockwood, chair of the House of Lords international agreements committee, wrote to the government to express his concern at the way the pharma deal had been waived through. He argued that the pharma deal is “clearly a significant arrangement with policy, fiscal and constitutional implications, which Parliament should be able to scrutinise,” and demanded answers from the government on the lack of democratic accountability.
The campaigners set up a crowdfunder on May 18, to cover the legal costs required to take the case, which needs to be heard within three months of the legislation being laid before parliament.
In just a couple of weeks, it has already raised over £30,000, almost two-thirds of the initial target, and enough to initiate the proceedings. The campaigners explain that the first £10,000 was “to get the case off the ground and in front of a judge. Then:
“If and when we get the judge’s permission to proceed, we’ll need to fundraise again to cover the further legal & court costs – so we are setting our stretch target at £50k.”
Donations are still needed and welcome at https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stop-nhs-drug-price-powergrab/ .
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