Pharmaceutical companies will leave the UK unless the Government and the NHS start to pay for breakthrough drugs, particularly cancer treatments, a senior executive at AstraZeneca has warned.

“It's depressing and demoralising that our latest drugs that are discovered here are not being used in the UK,” said Dr Mene Pangalos, executive vice-president of AstraZeneca’s innovative medicines and early development biotech unit .

“If it continues to be difficult and the healthcare system does not adopt the most important innovations that are becoming standards of care in other countries, clinical trials will reduce as the quality of the research available falls and the UK will become obsolete. Companies will leave and others will not come to the UK to invest.”

He called on the Government to spend more money on breakthrough medications and to change the way the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which decides which new drugs should be available on the NHS in England, assesses cancer treatments in particular.