Free IVF axed in county of treatment’s origin

Free IVF treatment on the NHS is to be scrapped in the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough area – the county where the groundbreaking procedure was pioneered 40 years ago.

Dr Gary Howsam, the chairman of the local clinical commissioning group, told the BBC it was “one of the hardest decisions we’ve had to take”. The move will save £700,000 a year.

It is the third place to withdraw free IVF treatment, after Croydon and Essex. Robert Edwards, a biologist, and Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist, fertilised the first human egg outside of a living organism, in a Cambridge laboratory in 1978.