Andy Burnham must show Trump’s Big Pharma deal the Red Card

8 Jul 2026

US private pharma companies are set to benefit from a secretive trade deal on drug imports, which could result in a more lethal outcome than the COVID-19 pandemic.

MPs weren’t consulted on this deal. The Government has so far failed to produce its own impact assessment. Until this month, MPs haven’t had a chance to debate it, and there’s barely been a peep out of the media about it.

The deal - called an 'arrangement' on the Parliament website - was agreed between the Starmer government and the Trump administration in December 2025. At the time, the Liberal Democrats branded it “a Trump shakedown of the NHS”.

Global Justice Now has created a petition urging the health minister to let MPs vote on the deal. And with change coming at the top of Government, the time is right for YOU to tell the next PM and Health Minister to rip up this terrifying deal.

What’s in the deal?

The authors of a new report, published in the British Medical Journal this month, argue that the diversion of billions of NHS funding to pay more for new drugs under the UK-US trade arrangement will harm public health and result in thousands of excess deaths.

Their analysis, featured in The Guardian, is truly shocking. Under the terms of the deal our NHS will have to pay 25% more over the next decade to pay for new medicines. That equates to £45bn diverted from essential services, leading to 229,000 avoidable deaths of patients.

To put that in context, the number of avoidable deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and June 2022 was approximately 137,000.

The headline elements are:

• the deal commits the UK to increase the net price it pays for new branded drugs by 25% over a decade from this year, reversing a decade-long trend of constrained NHS spending.
• It also reduces the repayment rate to 15% under the Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access and Growth (known as VGAR), a voluntary agreement that commits the pharmaceutical industry to return NHS overspend on branded medicine. According to a separate article in the British Medical Journal, "this will allow pharmaceutical companies to increase further their profit margins while key safeguards against overspending are discarded."

As part of an earlier report in The Guardian, Dr Andrew Hill, an expert on the drugs industry at the University of Liverpool, said the deal would see the NHS paying more money for the same amount of treatments. “NHS funding is limited, so if we have to pay higher drug prices, this means less money for doctors, nurses, ambulances [and] simple procedures which can save lives cheaply, using low-cost generic drugs”.

Ministers have defended the deal. They say it will allow UK drug exports to avoid tariffs. The trouble is, recent experience has taught us that US trade deals aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. And it leaves the door open for private US pharma companies to hold the NHS hostage and increase their prices.

But there's still time to change it. The key points are being phased in over time: a scheme to replace the VGAR is not yet at the pilot phase, and is not due to be implemented until 2028.

Rules? What rules?

If you’ve been following the FIFA World Cup, you’ll know that Donald Trump personally intervened this week to get a US player’s Red Card suspended. It’s been widely condemned as unfair, and tantamount to match-rigging in favour of the US. It also shows an “America First” attitude toward the rules.

Globally, trust in the US as a reliable partner has plummeted. So we think Andy Burnham must treat this drugs deal with extreme caution. He should show us where his priorities are and commit to holding on to vital NHS funds and saving lives. Show Trump the Red Card, and kick the deal out.

As Aditya Chakrobortty says in his terrific explanatory piece in The Guardian, “Soon, the UK will have a new prime minister, one who promised this week more democracy, more accountability, greater transparency. So here’s a test for Andy Burnham: is he really going to let this fatal deal, cooked up in private and shrouded in unforgivable secrecy, stand?”

Take action

• Sign the Global Justice Now petition [opens in the Global Justice Now website].

• Read the BMJ research.

• Read the terms of the Arrangement on the Parliament website.

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