As an executive agency of the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC), we are funded from Grant-in-Aid from the DHSC and devolved administrations and through licence fees charged to licensed establishments.
Today the Human Tissue Authority (HTA) has published licence fee levels for the 2024 to 2025 business year. The new fees can be found here.
As indicated to establishments in December, the HTA needs to make a notable, above inflation increase to license fees in 2024 to 2025. The licence fees for 2024 to 2025 reflect the increased pressure faced by HTA of rising costs amid unprecedented increases in inflation, as well as a change in funding policy from our sponsor Department, DHSC.
The Department now requires the HTA to raise a higher proportion of its income from fees (our funding from DHSC is due to reduce by around a third in 2024 to 2025). In order to recover the forecast cost of regulation in 2024 to 2025, we will need to increase fees on average by 21.8%.
In recent years, we have adapted the way we regulate and the tools we use in order to keep any fee rises to a minimum. This strong focus on efficiency and effectiveness has meant that our fee increases over the past three years have been significantly below inflation, but we are no longer able to absorb cost increases without it impacting on the quality of the work that we do.
The HTA licence fees are set to recover the actual cost of regulation within each sector. This is reflected in the different fee levels and structures for each sector we licence and ensures there is no cross subsidisation across sectors.
Below are details of changes for the 2024 to 2025 financial year as follows:
- Licence fees are set to recover the actual cost of regulation which, despite a continuing focus on efficiencies and best practice, has increased due to inflation. The resulting increase in total fees recovered is 21.8%.
- Fee increases for Human Application, Post Mortem and the ODT (Organ Donation & Transplantation) sector were capped in 2023 to 2024. In order to ensure the actual costs are fully recovered next year, the fee increase for 2024 to 2025 will be higher than for other sectors (average fee increases: HA 24.9%; PM 22.7%; and ODT 13.6%).
- Fee increases for Research, Anatomy and Public Display were increased in full in 2023 to 2024 and fee increases for those sectors are all lower at 11.5% or less.
If you have any questions regarding HTA licence fees, please email finance@hta.gov.uk.