Tories promise to improve dementia funding

The Conservatives have promised to spend more than £1.6 billion on dementia research, if elected on 12 December.

The announcement, which the Tories claim is the largest boost to dementia research ever in the UK, will double current funding levels, setting Britain’s finest scientists to work on a ‘Dementia Moonshot’.

The scale of investment into a cure for dementia, which represents an additional £83 million a year, will be spent on increasing the number of clinical research academics and researchers in innovative techniques such as advanced therapeutics and neurotechnologies.

The number of people who suffer from dementia in the UK currently stands at 850,000 and is set to rise to more than a million by the middle of the next decade, before doubling in the next 30 years. Meanwhile, care costs are due to triple from £37.4 billion to 94.1 billion by 2040.

Additionally, a new £500 million fund has been pledged to build on the success of the Cancer Drugs Fund to give patients quicker access to the most cutting-edge medicines for cancer and other diseases. Hailing the success of the Cancer Drugs Fund, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has laid out how its successor the Innovative Medicines Fund will be bigger and better. The new fund has increased funding and its scope is extended to more diseases.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “Dementia can have a devastating impact on families and affects millions across the UK. The impact on health and wellbeing, the pain felt by loved ones and the stress and anxiety of enduring this disease blights too many lives. It is one of the great medical challenges of our time and this is our plan to tackle it: a record injection of cash that unleashes the brilliant British science community that brought the world penicillin, IVF and Proton Beam Therapy for cancer.

“It is a plan that gets right to the heart of the choice voters face on the 12 December. Vote for the Conservatives and we can get Brexit done, unlock our potential and focus on making people’s lives better. Or vote Jeremy Corbyn for more Brexit delay and the chaos of two referendums continuing to clog our political system and stopping our great country from getting anything done.”