OBJECTIVES: Patient access schemes (PAS) give UK patients access to medicines not normally funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and balance company profits and competitiveness with government interests to ensure availability of medicines at reasonable prices. In April 2011 the NHS payer funded Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) was introduced in England to further improve access to life saving cancer medicines not approved by NICE. The objective of this study was to determine whether access to new, non-NICE funded oncology medicines continues to rely on the relatively cost effective PAS or increasingly depends on the more costly NHS payer funded CDF.  METHODS: A search was undertaken for all NICE- or Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC)-approved HTAs incorporating a PAS (PAS-HTAs) 4 years before and after introduction of the CDF. In addition, all medicines approved for use under the CDF were identified. RESULTS: Fifty five of 128 NICE- or SMC-approved PAS-HTAs between October 2007 and June 2015 were in oncology. Of these, 10 NICE and 4 SMC PAS-HTAs had been approved prior to, whereas 17 NICE and 24 SMC PAS-HTAs had been approved after introduction of the CDF, amounting to an almost 6-fold increase in SMC PAS-HTAs but a less than 2-fold increase in NICE PAS-HTAs over a similar period. However, 7 oncology medicines receiving HTA approval by the SMC but not NICE were included in the May 2015 CDF list of approved medicines. CONCLUSIONS: Since the introduction of the CDF, there has been a discrepancy between the number of PAS-HTAs in cancer treatments between NICE and the SMC. For selected medicines, the CDF appears not to have improved access to oncology products as part of PAS-HTAs but rather lead to increased costs to health service payers.