Access to Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill
(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)
Read Full debate13:32 - The House divided: - Ayes: 32 / Noes: 19 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences (George Freeman)
It is a great pleasure, Madam Deputy Speaker, to serve under your stewardship today. I am usually to be found in my constituency on a Friday, unlike some colleagues who are more often here on Fridays, and it is a great pleasure to be able to debate private Members’ business and respond to this very important debate on this very important subject.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), who has had a very busy summer trying to work with the huge number of people who have taken an interest in this Bill to try to get it to a place where it can command majority support. He has been tireless in that work. He will know from this debate that there is more to do, but I know he has the appetite for it. That is not least because he and many Members across the House often see from their constituency mailboxes, as well as from their own family experiences, the great pressure there is from patients, particularly those with a diagnosis for which there is no known treatment, for us in Government to do everything we can to accelerate access to the growing range of innovations. I am privileged to be the Minister responsible for the sector that is bringing those innovations to us.
I want to pay tribute to one or two other colleagues in this House and in the other place. The noble Lord Saatchi built up the original momentum and head of steam with his Bill in the other place during the previous Parliament. My hon. Friend has sought to develop that in his Bill, which is in many ways different but trying to achieve the same ends.
My hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) has been a vocal supporter of the great campaigner Les Halpin, who was diagnosed with a terminal disease and launched the Empower: Access to Medicine campaign. They have both been very vocal in supporting not only this Bill but the wider innovation agenda.
I also want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the patients who suffer from terminal and untreated diseases, as well as their families, carers and loved ones. As the Minister for Life Sciences, it often falls to me to sign off very difficult decisions by NICE and NHS England. In the past six to nine months, I have met many people who are passionate about those of us in government and in Parliament doing everything we can to accelerate access to innovation. For all those reasons, this debate is timely and important.
An awful lot of points have been raised both this morning and in the months leading up to the Bill’s Second Reading, and I will deal as substantially as I can with the issues to which the Bill has given rise. I want to say something about the wider context in which the Bill seeks to accelerate innovation, not least the things the Government are already doing. I want to say something about the problem and, indeed, the opportunity for the UK and for patients and the NHS. Some colleagues have hinted at the ambiguity in their minds about the problem the Bill seeks to solve, so I want to shed some light on what I think the problem is that we are trying to solve. Before one legislates, it is never a bad thing to be clear about the problem.
I then want to say something about the importance of public support for and patient trust in our clinical research and medical landscape. We lead the world in medical research: the NHS in the UK is globally recognised as a leader and we set the gold standard in ethical, regulatory and other aspects of clinical research. It is absolutely vital that the Bill reinforces and supports that, and does not in any way, with or without reason, alarm or undermine public trust and confidence in our NHS and our research infrastructure. To that end, I also want to look at some of the protections proposed by the Bill and the safeguards that are already in place, to address some of the key concerns raised, to highlight where the Bill is supported and to set out the Government’s position.
I will start by addressing the context. Colleagues have touched on the UK’s glorious history in medical innovation —from amputation in the 18th and 19th centuries to penicillin, bypass surgery, transplantation, the discovery of DNA and pioneering discoveries on genomics and digital health. Barely a month goes by without this country making another significant step forward in biomedical science. On any indicator, but particularly on the numbers of patents and learned papers, we punch well above our weight. We are the global leader on medical science and research per capita.
The Government place a very high priority on the promotion of medical innovation, not least because the context of our economy and the very urgent challenges faced by our health service demand that we significantly increase the pace at which we adopt innovation. The “Five Year Forward View” by the chief executive and the management team of NHS England, which landed on the Government’s doormat a year ago, powerfully sets out the scale of that challenge.
By the end of this Parliament, demand for healthcare will be rising fast. There are 1 million more pensioners in 2015 than there were in 2010, and there will be 1 million more in 2020, while thousands of people are now living to over 85. Those who heard the piece on Radio 4 this morning will know that we now have thousands of people living to over 100. Indeed, we have the oldest citizen of the globe in Britain: she is 114 today. Such a situation is a magnificent tribute to the extraordinary advances of our biomedical, life science and medical sector, but it of course creates added pressures on our health system because in the last decades of life our health demand rises exponentially.
The NHS has set out that, as a result of that rising demand and of the obesity and dementia epidemics in our society, health will require an extra £30 billion by the end of this Parliament. NHS England has stated that it can deal with £22 billion of that through the profound adoption of innovation to change care pathways —keeping people out of hospital, diagnosing earlier, treating smarter and embracing digital, genomic and a range of other technologies—but it has also stated that the NHS will need more money. I am delighted to be a Minister in a Government who immediately said we would put in the necessary money.
We will earn some of that money, not least through our leadership in the medical innovation and life sciences space. That is why the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and leading Ministers in the former coalition Government set out in 2011 the UK’s groundbreaking life science strategy. The Prime Minister launched it in December 2011, and it is now my great privilege to be the Minister with responsibility for its implementation. At the heart of the strategy is the belief that by profoundly integrating our NHS healthcare delivery system with our research and innovation sector we can achieve a win-win-win situation: we can improve healthcare productivity by embracing new technologies; we can do so in a way that drives investment into the UK; and we can make this country as much a leading pioneer in the research, development and commercialisation of life and health science research in the 21st century as it was in the 20th century.
As the Minister for Life Sciences in the Department of Health in combination, for the first time, with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, my mission is clear: to accelerate the uptake of innovation in our health system and to unleash the power of our health system as a research engine. Essentially, the model is based on two cylinders of support. We have traditionally supported our life science and healthcare innovation sector through BIS, with a set of policies on investing in deep science, translational infrastructure and skills, but we have now decided that in the 21st century we must integrate that with our health service. The second cylinder is the health system, which is pumping in access to data on the genome or tissues and to our £1 billion a year clinical research infrastructure. Just as importantly—this brings us to the nub of the Bill—it is accelerating the uptake of innovation in our health service. That is my mission and that of the Department of Health’s directorate of innovation, growth and technology, which the Government created at the same time as they set up my ministerial role.
Innovation is an urgent priority for this Government and, indeed, for all western Governments tackling the profound healthcare challenges caused by growing demand. That is why, during the past five years and during this Parliament, the NHS has made it such a priority. As other colleagues have mentioned, the essence of the strategy is set out in the NHS report on “Innovation, Health and Wealth”, which captures the mission I have described and sets out a huge range of initiatives designed to drive the uptake of innovation across the system. You will be relieved to hear, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I will not list those initiatives, because there are a huge number of them, but I reassure the House that we are monitoring their delivery closely. We have launched the innovation scorecard, and through the digitisation of CCG scorecards, we will shortly build in an uptake of innovation metric, so that patients and users across the system can begin to see from heat maps which CCGs or parts of our NHS are the most innovative.
The fundamental challenge remains that to be a competitive life and health science research economy and to drive innovation into our health system in the way we need, we must take a more profound approach to tackle the challenges and barriers. That is why I launched the accelerated access review last year, which seeks to address three important questions at the heart of this agenda. There is a new landscape because the model for the development of drugs is undergoing a profound change. The 20th-century model is very silo-ed: there is deep research on a drug in universities; it is spun out to companies, if they are lucky; it is funded and acquired by a pharmaceutical company, if they are lucky; and there is a 15-year development pathway—the average drug takes more than $2 billion and 15 years to develop—before it is brought back to the oh-so-patient patient waiting at the end of the chain. Our strategy recognises that that is too long and too expensive for patients, the industry and the NHS.
That problem is also an opportunity, because the profound advances in genomics and informatics mean that we are getting to a point where we no longer have to take that amount of time to de-risk the development pathway. In an era when a genomic biomarker can predict which patient will respond to a drug and which cohorts of patients will develop certain variations of a disease, we can dramatically accelerate the development of drugs and our ability to get innovations to patients in a way that hugely reduces the cost and the risk.
We are asking three questions at the heart of the accelerated access review, which a number of colleagues have asked about. First, what can we do to make it easier and quicker for innovators outside our health system to get clinical validation in the NHS? That would unleash not only the power of our £1 billion-a-year clinical research infrastructure, but the power of our NHS, which treats millions of patients every month, to act as an innovation platform, day in, day out.
Secondly, how do the new technologies of genomics and informatics change the way in which NICE and the regulators can assess, reimburse and work out the health economics in respect of innovations in the new landscape? When a drug comes to the system with a companion diagnostic and has an absolute guarantee of working in certain patients on the back of a genomic biomarker, it profoundly changes the way in which NICE is able to assess the drug. It unlocks the possibility of targeting drugs much more quickly at the right patients and changing the way in which we reimburse. We will be able to reimburse on the basis not of an average quality of life adjusted year, a notional price or a calculation of the health economic benefit for the average patient, but of real value in our health economy for different patient groups who respond in different ways to different drugs. Just as NICE took the lead in the 20th-century model of health economics, I want it to lead in the 21st century and to embrace the new technologies.
Thirdly—and this goes to the heart of the space in which the Bill is positioned—what can we do, when we have a proven innovation, to reduce the barriers to rolling it out across the system? The NHS has a mixed track record on innovation. On the one hand, it has pioneered brilliantly, particularly in our specialist tertiary research centres, innovations that have changed global medicine, some of which I have listed. On the other hand, we have been poor at rolling out innovations in our own system across the breadth of the country. Improving that is a key ambition of the AAR.
The Bill comes in the context of our asking what we can do to incentivise the uptake of best practice across the NHS. I will say a little more about the difference between innovation and research in a moment. The Bill’s focus on supporting 21st-century medics to be more aware of what is available to them when prescribing and its insistence on their sovereignty and freedom in making clinical judgments as professionals are important and helpful.
The glorious history of medical innovation has relied on profound scientific breakthroughs, some of which I have listed, but it also contains a long-standing pattern of unpredictable and accidental innovations, many of which have been profound and have delivered substantial benefits to patients. The discovery of penicillin was an observational accident by an inquiring mind. More recently—you may well know about this, Madam Deputy Speaker—Viagra was developed as a heart treatment and the discovery of the benefit that it is now used for was completely accidental. The company in question discovered that none of the sachets of the drug that it had sent out to patients for the trial, some of which are normally returned at the end of the trial with a medical form, were returned. That was quite striking to the company and when it asked why they had not been returned, it discovered that the drug had a completely different benefit, which led to its being relicensed and becoming the popular drug that it is today. Again, that completely accidental discovery has benefited millions of patients. It is important to understand that accident and observation have always played a powerful role in our leadership of life sciences and research.
I will have a go at defining the problem and the opportunity that the Bill rightly tries to address. I do not for a minute pretend that it is simple, as has been highlighted in this debate. If the Bill goes into Committee, I suspect that this is something that the Committee will want to look at. I suggest that we should be looking at three or four issues. The first is the barriers to the uptake of innovation in our health system. There are a number of barriers and I will not delay the House with a long exposition of them all. Suffice it to say that they are in part organisational, in part financial and in part cultural.
The most profound barrier to the uptake of innovation is that innovating in our health system normally requires the permission of an awful lot of people—not always clinical permission, but purchasing permission and procurement permission. As the health service rightly seeks to drive procurement efficiencies and control spending, we often inadvertently make it harder for people to innovate with treatments.
The biggest barrier in terms of substantial innovation in care pathways tends to be that the person who is asked to make the initial investment in a preventive treatment or any new treatment is often not the person on whose budget the benefits of improved treatment or outcomes will fall. The AAR is looking at that silo-ed budgeting and other organisational, financial and cultural barriers to the uptake of innovation in the system.
Procurement is an important factor. As part of Lord Carter’s review of procurement in the NHS and the Department’s efficiency drive, we are looking at how we can use the single purchaser advantage of the NHS to drive up procurement efficiencies and at how we can make it easier for front-line clinicians to innovate by making procurement decisions that drive efficiencies into their own local health economy, at whatever scale that is.
There is a barrier to innovation in respect of data. Information on innovative treatments and their benefits and on the improvements that different parts of the system are able to deliver is not always allowed to flow through our health system. Even today, there are huge differentials of efficiency and clinical outcome in different therapeutic areas that are not properly picked up or measured. That is part of what the programme of accountability and transparency that the Secretary of State and I are running through the CCG monitoring exercise and My NHS is intended to tackle.
Quite soon, we think that patients will want to click on My NHS and ask us the right questions, such as, “Why is my mother’s clinical outcome in Norfolk three or four times better or worse than my mother-in-law’s clinical prospects in London?” I do not for a minute seek to denigrate Norfolk’s health service—it is doing magnificently well—but my point is that there are regional variations. We want the public and patients to be aware of them and to ask their CCGs, the Government and their health professionals why they are there and what can be done to tackle them.
There have been a number of questions today about the fear of litigation. The Government’s consultation on the original Medical Innovation Bill highlighted some concerns about litigation. One difficulty is that much of the early reporting and discussion on that Bill created the impression that that was the problem that it sought to highlight. Of course, the picture is more subtle, difficult and complex than that, but it is worth highlighting that, as a number of colleagues have pointed out, the cost of clinical negligence claims to our health service is substantial. The latest figures that I have to hand state that in 2012-13, 10,000 claims were made and the payments totalled £1.2 billion. It is true that many of those claims related not to innovation, but to obstetrics and other standard procedures. However, the NHS is conscious of that bill and in most of our hospitals and other institutions, there is an acute awareness that we live in an ever more litigious society. Heaven forbid that we should ever become like America, where litigation is a daily routine in the health system, but we need to be aware of the risk. There is a legitimate fear among clinicians of doing anything that might trigger a reasonable or unreasonable claim for litigation.
Dr Wollaston
How much of the litigation cost is related to complaints about innovative treatments?
George Freeman
Most of the cases are a result of other contexts— as my hon. Friend will know, obstetrics is a big part of that—rather than innovation. I am happy to write to her with the actual figure as I do not have it to hand. My point is that the fear of litigation runs through the system.
I recently spoke to a senior paediatric consultant who is neutral about this Bill—he is neither a passionate advocate nor an opponent of it. He observed that over the past 20 or 30 years, a gradual conservatism has crept into clinical practice. When I asked what he thought drove that, he mentioned three things. First, ever tighter procurement control makes it harder to do things differently. Secondly, there is a subtly growing fear of negligence, and a lack of clear data information and guidance on what is available. Thirdly, many clinicians find it easier to stick to normal practice, and that is what the Bill seeks to tackle.
Heidi Alexander
The Minister and the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) have referred to anecdotal remarks about fear of litigation being a barrier to medical innovation. Can the Minister set out his evidence that that is a widespread concern and genuinely prevents doctors from innovating and prescribing new treatments?
George Freeman
The hon. Lady makes an important point because it is difficult to quantify the impact of that fear. I have gone out of my way to make it clear that I do not think that issue is a primary concern, and that the organisational, cultural and financial barriers are higher concerns. That is partly what is difficult about the Bill. It gives the impression that fear of litigation is the big problem, whereas anecdotally I hear from leading clinicians—who, as I said, are not particularly for or against the Bill—that it is one of a number of issues in a complex landscape.
I am conscious of the time, so I will turn to the critical importance of patient and public trust and confidence in our clinical research infrastructure and NHS. The UK leads in clinical trials and in regulation through NICE, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, and our ethical framework. I am delighted that over the past four or five years we have made substantial improvements in recruiting more patients into trials. In 2014-15 the National Institute for Health Research—the jewel in the crown of NHS research—had 4,934 studies running, and last year we recruited 52 global first patients into trials. That is a key indicator of our leadership in the most innovative areas of medicine.
The MHRA has approved more than 80 first-in-human studies, and the NHS is becoming a leader in the forefront of that model of research, just as it was in the earlier part of the 20th century. It is also important to consider our leadership in regulation, ethics and approval, not least because those are major exports for this country. Over the next few decades, rapidly emerging economies will be looking for a lead from NICE, MHRA and our clinical trials infrastructure, and it is crucial to have a strong patient voice, and to maintain and develop patient trust. Central to my mission is to bring forward such development and put a stronger patient voice at the heart of our research landscape.
Patient empowerment through technology and access to innovation are key themes of our mission and work, and medical research charities have a huge role to play. In this new research landscape in which genomic information, patient data, records and medical histories become such key assets for research, the question is who will control that information. I think that we should build a policy landscape on the notion that such information and assets ultimately belong to the patient, and that the sovereignty of their relationship with their clinician should remain sacrosanct.
To answer an earlier question from the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), there is nothing in the Government’s plans to make such a database available to the public and drive the sort of quackery charter that I know the Chair of the Health Committee is worried about. We do not want to change the law that prevents pharmaceutical companies from talking to patients directly, and it is important that recruitment into clinical trials and access to innovation is done through patients and their clinicians.
Charities will have an increasingly important role. Cancer Research UK leads in much of this area, and many smaller charities are becoming strong advocates for their patients and collecting data. With the rise of apps and digital technologies, charities will soon create portals for patients to get involved in research communities, and work with industry and academics to drive and accelerate innovation.
Dr Wollaston
Does the Minister accept that all the bodies he has referred to, as well as the Association of Medical Research Charities, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, have expressed concern that the Bill could undermine recruitment to clinical trials? That is an important point and I hope the Minister will accept that it is a genuine concern.
George Freeman
I was addressing that point to make it clear that I and the Government take strongly the need to ensure that the Bill does not undermine patient support in any way. I have heard some of those concerns, and if the Bill goes to Committee it is important to address them. It is also crucial to protect and support the sovereignty of clinicians to look after their patients, and to do as much as possible to try to liberate them from the burden of unnecessary bureaucracy and excessive targets. We must remind clinicians that they have freedoms in law and a vocational mission to do whatever they think is best for their patients.
On safeguards and protections let me make three important points about the Bill. I have taken advice from counsel, and I will respond to a number of questions raised by colleagues. As currently drafted the Bill provides no change to existing protections on medical negligence, and that is important. It sets out the power to create a database, and a mechanism to make clear to clinicians how they can demonstrate compliance with existing legal protection—the Bolam test has been referred to—and allow innovations to be recorded for the benefit of other clinicians and their patients. Importantly for the Government, that does not change existing protections on medical negligence, and it is crucial to understand that. Secondly, the Bill does not change our gold standard regulatory and ethical framework for clinical research. The Bill is not about research; it is about reinforcing freedoms for clinicians and how they prescribe. I will return to the detail of that in a minute.
Heidi Alexander
The Minister says that the Bill does not change the law on medical negligence but sets up an alternative pathway or framework. Does he accept that that could confuse matters?
George Freeman
That is an important question. The Bill does not change the legal framework on negligence; it merely seeks to clarify matters for those doctors who understand that they have the freedom to innovate but fear that current understanding in law about the test is not clear enough. It sets out an agreed, statutorily approved procedure to reassure doctors that if they follow that procedure, they will be covered by existing negligence and liability protection that the Bill does not change in any way. The hon. Lady’s second point is about whether people understand that, and whether there is a risk of the Bill inadvertently triggering fear. That is an important point, and it behoves everyone to ensure that we discuss it in the right way.
I have been shocked by some—not all—of the briefings, one of which referred to this being a “concentration camp” or a “Mengele” charter. Such unhelpful language triggers unhelpful media interest and will alarm patients completely unnecessarily. All the provisions in the Bill reinforce and endorse existing safeguards on the use of data and regulatory protection.
Time is short, but I want address the concerns that have been raised by hon. Members across the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry gave a powerful speech and my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) made a number of interventions. There were contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) for Shipley (Philip Davies) and for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), and the hon. Members for Lewisham East and for Bolsover (Mr Skinner). I would like to take the opportunity to welcome the shadow Secretary of State to her post. I value hugely her offer to work on the Bill in a cross-party spirit and to deal with the issues raised. If the Bill goes to Committee, that will be an important offer. I am certainly happy to take it up and see, in a cross-party spirit, whether we can help to ensure that it does not trigger the doubts that she and other hon. Members have expressed concern about.
I want to address the specific concerns raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes. She is a very distinguished Chairman of the Health Committee, as well as a doctor. For those reasons, they merit proper scrutiny and attention. I apologise to her if I am unable to deal with all of her concerns, but I will try to address them all.
The first concern is that the Bill is based on a false premise, which is that doctors are afraid to innovate because of fear of litigation. I reaffirm that the Department of Health’s consultation on the previous Medical Innovation Bill revealed that some doctors do find the threat of litigation to be a block to innovation, although that was not a universal view and I do not want to suggest in any way that it is the principal barrier. This Bill is aimed at reassuring those doctors who feel unable to innovate due to concerns about litigation. It sets out a series of steps that doctors can choose to take when innovating, to give them confidence that they have acted responsibly. I read the Bill again this morning and I am happy to highlight some of the key protections in it.
Dr Wollaston
Will the Minister clarify that the vast majority of medical bodies feel that it is not a barrier to innovation, and that there are some important points where we need to protect patients from irresponsible innovation? We have to accept that there is a risk inherent in going down a route that would make that possible.
George Freeman
My hon. Friend makes an important point about public trust, and patient safety and confidence. I do not want to detain the House by reading the relevant provisions in the Bill. I think my hon. Friend has tried, during the summer, to draft a Bill that deals with a number of those concerns. She makes the important point that if the Bill is inadvertently undermining public trust and confidence, that is in itself a problem. That is partly a function of how people discuss it and it is regrettable that the Bill has generated the level of antagonism it has, but she makes an important point that we should look at those specific measures and ensure we tackle the issues and concerns that leading doctors have raised.
Dr Wollaston
My initial point was whether the Minister would accept that the overwhelming number of respondents felt that fear of litigation was not the barrier?
George Freeman
I made the point earlier that the barriers to access of innovation are much broader than the fear of litigation, and I am happy to reinforce that.
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
The Minister will know that in the treatment of wet AMD Lucentis costs £700 an injection and Avastin £60. Does he think the Bill could help clinicians use Avastin to treat wet AMD, thereby saving the NHS, I understand, some £84 million?
George Freeman
My hon. Friend is quick to leap on to a very important point. The answer is no, because in law we have an important provision to protect people who invest billions of pounds in developing new innovations. Clinicians are free to use alternative off-label drugs where there is evidence they work, but not on the basis of cost. We have a presumption in law that where a drug is licensed or on patent for a particular indagation, which is the protection for the company that has invested to bring the drug to market, we allow an alternative to be used only where there is clinical evidence, not on cost grounds. The price falls dramatically when drugs come off patent and the generics industry picks them up. There is price protection for a short period of patent life to create the incentive for people to make the extraordinary investments up front. We then get the benefit of cheap drugs through the generics sector.
Mr Baker
The Minister raises a critical point. I am concerned that cost grounds do matter and that some people might be going without early treatment for wet AMD, because they cannot, for a range of reasons, access Avastin. My concern is that people might be going untreated for wet AMD at a point when the relevant drug, Avastin, might help them more than Lucentis at a later stage.
George Freeman
My hon. Friend makes an important point. The NICE clinical guidance to NHS England, after carrying out a health technology appraisal, is binding. NHS England has a duty to implement it across the system. There is an issue about how quickly different parts of the NHS implement guidance and how quickly innovative drugs are rolled out. Another Bill going through the House will be looking at what can be done to support the use of off-label drugs. My position on that is that the most profound barrier to the adoption of off-label drugs is in fact information for clinicians on the clinical benefits of an off-label indagation. It is the clinical evidence that provides the basis on which they are perfectly free at the moment to use alternative drugs.
Let me address the other points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes, the Chairman of the Select Committee. She expressed concern that the Bill would undermine research and clinical trials. That is an important point. I stress that the Bill, as drafted, does not cover clinical trials, which are regulated by the MHRA and the HRA from a scientific, safety and ethical viewpoint. Rightly, the Bill does not stray into that regulatory environment. I confirm that we would be concerned if it did. It does not relate to formal clinical research, only to clinicians’ duties to their care of individual patients. If the database is got right, we think it could contribute to the sum of healthcare knowledge by collecting information on innovations and their success or not.
My hon. Friend said that she fears the Bill would do more harm than good. I merely point out that the chief medical officer for England supported the final version of the Medical Innovation Bill, which ran out of time in the House of Lords at the end of the previous Parliament. The national clinical director for NHS England confirmed that he had no concerns about patients’ safety with regard to that Bill. Hon. Members may debate whether the Bill is needed, but it is really important to understand that we are clear that the Bill in no way damages patient safety. The test of responsibility under the Bill is intended to reflect absolutely the requirement of the Bolam test, which has been the gold standard for decades. I highlight that a doctor has to obtain any consents required by law when taking a decision to part from the existing range of medical treatments. The Bill expressly provides that a doctor must have regard in particular to the requirements of patient safety. Under both existing common law and the Bill, the doctor would need to show that they had acted responsibly. There is absolutely no escape for a negligent doctor under the Bill. The Bill seeks to give doctors access to the database as a source of learning—doctors, not patients. We hope that if the database has got right it could help to drive both innovation and information through the system.
My hon. Friend set out some concerns about safeguards for patients. I reiterate that the Government are clear that the negligence provisions in the Bill do not provide any immunity to irresponsible doctors. It would be irresponsible for anyone to suggest that they do. I want to make that point very clearly from the Dispatch Box and to reassure her that in our view the Bill does not remove any of the current safeguards in place to protect patients’ safety. Our view is that the Bill does not apply a weaker test to a doctor’s decision to innovate than the existing law on clinical negligence.
My hon. Friend raised points about the rigour of the database, which I will come on to in a moment. A number of other concerns have been raised. I want to run quickly through, in two batches, the concerns about the database and about negligence and legal protections. Colleagues have asked whether there is really a need for legislation for a database. I confirm that the Bill gives power to the Secretary of State to confer functions on the Health and Social Care Information Centre in relation to the establishment of a database. Legislation enables provision to be made for the disclosure of information from the databases, ensuring that the HSCIC has the necessary powers to disclose information and that appropriate safeguards are in place. Were the Bill to become law, we would obviously consult on regulations setting out the detail of how the database would be constructed.
Heidi Alexander
Does that power not exist under section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012?
George Freeman
The hon. Lady might be surprised to know I do not have that section right in front of me, but I will happily come back to her. The Bill would allow a database to be created for specific purposes. It is not for me to judge the merits of the wording of different private Members’ Bills, but this would not be the first such Bill to command the authority of the House and then to be rewritten to put into effect the ambitions it sets out. I think, however, that the Bill goes a lot further than the existing powers in requiring us to consider a database with specific functions linked to providing a mechanism of statutory protections for clinicians under existing law. We understand what it is trying to achieve, although it is complex in that it does not change the legal protections but merely sets out a particular runway in which clinicians can have confidence.
Questions have been asked about how the database will work. As I have said, if the Bill becomes law, we will want to consult on regulations, but it is intended to be principally for the use of medical practitioners, not patients. We would not support the Bill if it were to be a database—my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee expressed concern about that point—providing support for companies, quacks and unregulated providers to contact patients directly and to validate illegitimate innovations. It is for clinicians to record the innovations that they, in their professional judgment, have decided to adopt. We would envisage the database being used to flag a treatment as innovative, meaning it would be coded and picked up by the HSCIC, allowing us to form a national database.
Questions have been asked about who would submit information to the database. As with all data provisions, patient confidentiality will absolutely be protected. I would envisage the detail of who could access information, and in what circumstances, being a source of substantial discussion, if and when we came to pass regulations. I stress, however, that it would not be used by patients. We could not support that.
Questions have also been asked about who would determine which groups could get information. It is designed for clinicians, the HSCIC and regulators. At the moment, a doctor passing information to the HSCIC is bound by the common law duty of confidentiality and their professional obligations. The HSCIC would need to be satisfied that any disclosure was in accordance with the law, including the Data Protection Act 1998.
Hon. Members asked about funding. The exact level of grant in aid required would be subject to additional scoping by the HSCIC, and if the House decided to proceed, we would need to come back with the details. Hon. Members also asked whether the treatments in the database would be flagged with some kitemark or advert. The Government would oppose this being used as a marketing tool. Such flagging by means of kitemarks, being regulated differently, would not be appropriate. We want a database focused on helping doctors to see what other clinicians have decided is an appropriate treatment. We would see the database not as a process of quality assurance, but as a way for doctors to learn from and see transparently what other doctors have decided is an appropriate treatment.
I turn quickly to the negligence and regulatory questions. Colleagues have asked whether the negligence provisions provide another way for doctors to carry out research, circumventing the usual safeguards. The answer is an emphatic no. The Bill would apply not to research, but only to individual treatment decisions, as clarified in clause 5(2). Research is highly regulated—rightly so—by the Health Research Authority and the MHRA. Research studies cannot go ahead without ethical approval overseen by the HRA, and research that involves clinical trials and the investigation of medicinal products must be thus authorised. The Bill is concerned with innovations in individual treatments by clinicians. The results of an innovation might trigger further research—I think my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry envisages the database triggering questions such as, “Well, if one or two clinicians think this is an appropriate innovation, shouldn’t we look at whether it might be more widely applicable?”—but that would then take it into the more formal jurisdiction of a research application.
Hon. Members asked whether the Bill would relate to clinical trials. It is important to note that it does not cover clinical trials, which are regulated by the MHRA and the HRA. We would not want the Bill to stray into that territory and risk undermining that international gold mark of UK clinical trials infrastructure. It has been asked whether innovation is just the same as research. I strongly believe they are not the same thing, although they are often confused. They are closely related, but they are not the same thing. Research is highly regulated; innovation is the application of different ways of practising medicine, which clinicians have always done. That is partly what makes it hard to regulate and why the Bill has raised the questions it has.
Hon. Members asked whether patients would be asked for their consent before being given an innovative treatment. Yes, patients would have to give their consent. There is no change to the law of consent, which requires patients to provide informed and voluntary consent to any treatment offered. Colleagues have also asked whether the Government support the Bill in the light of the concerns raised by the medical profession about its impact on patient safety. I will confirm the Government’s position in a moment, but we believe it is an important and timely debate for the reasons I have set out, and we support the intentions behind the Bill. My hon. Friend has engaged with those who have raised concerns, and if the Bill goes to Committee, issues raised today would need to be tackled, but in the view of the Government and parliamentary counsel it does not undermine the current law on clinical negligence.
It has been asked in the House this morning and in the run-up to the debate whether the Bill is safe for patients. I again repeat that the Bill does not remove any of the current safeguards on patient safety. The test of responsibility in the Bill is intended to be the nearest possible equivalent to the Bolam test. It simply seeks to provide clarity via a mechanism by which doctors can be sure they are complying with that test.
Heidi Alexander
As I understand it, the current test requires a doctor to seek the advice and medical opinion of a responsible body, while the arrangements in the Bill require them to seek someone else’s view on whether such a responsible body holds an opinion about the safety of treatment. I think those two things are slightly different. Does the Minister share that concern?
George Freeman
The hon. Lady raises an interesting point. I am just looking at clause 3(2):
“For the purposes of taking a responsible decision to depart from the existing range of accepted medical treatments for a condition, a doctor must in particular—
(a) obtain the views of one or more appropriately qualified doctors in relation to the proposed medical treatment, with a view to ascertaining whether the treatment would have the support of a responsible body of medical opinion,
(b)take full account of the views obtained…(and do so in a way in which any responsible doctor would be expected to take account of…),
(c) obtain any consents required by law”,
including
(d)(i) any opinions or requests expressed by or in relation to the patient,
(ii) the risks and benefits”
and to
(e) take such other steps as are necessary to secure that the decision is made in a way that is accountable and transparent.”
Let me repeat that we would not even countenance supporting the Bill if its intention were in any way to change the basic test of clinical professionalism to which every clinician is subject. They remain subject to all the professional safeguards of the GMC and other regulatory bodies and clinical negligence law. The Bill merely seeks to put in place one particular mechanism on which doctors can rely to be clear that the innovation they propose is in accordance with the law. There is a danger of thinking of that if this Bill ever became law, it would be the last and final word on the area of medical innovation. It would absolutely not be; it is a small contribution to a vast canon of common law and practice that—importantly for the Government—does not change.
Counsel’s advice to us has been very clear that the negligence provisions provide no immunity to irresponsible doctors. Under both existing common law and this Bill’s provisions, doctors will need to show that they have acted responsibly. There will be no escape for a negligent doctor.
Members have asked whether the Bill will allow doctors to prescribe untested medicines. It is important to make it clear that the Bill does not change existing medicines legislation, which permits the use of unlicensed medicines —tested or untested—prescribed by physicians on their own responsibility, subject to all their own professional tests, regulatory conditions and the law. This will be based on what they believe, in their own professional clinical judgment, is right for their patients. If there is an unmet medical need, there is clearly more scope for clinicians to innovate.
Finally, I was asked whether the Bill will prevent patients from making a claim if they receive negligent treatment. No. I want to be clear that this Bill in no way changes patients’ rights to claim for negligent treatment. We are completely committed to ensuring that patients are safe and protected. On the occasions when, regrettably, things go wrong and treatment has been given negligently, it is absolutely right that patients are entitled to seek compensation. It is essential that any new legislation or any amendments to the Bill do not put patients at risk in any way. If a doctor carries out a procedure negligently, they would not be protected by this Bill, as is made clear in clause 4(3).
In conclusion, let me highlight that although substantial concerns have been raised—my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes has expressed some of them this morning—it is true to say that there has been support for the Bill. The “Empower: Access to Medicine” campaign has said:
“This new Bill provides a real opportunity to renew the focus on patients’ rights to try innovative medicines within a reasonable risk framework. Empower: Access to Medicine has long advocated appropriate access, for some patients, to certain medicines earlier in the clinical trials process. Chris Heaton-Harris’ new Bill provides a real opportunity to make that ambition a reality.”
It is particularly supportive of the accelerated access review that I am running. A number of colleagues have suggested that we look at the Bill in the context of those recommendations that will shortly arrive on my desk.
The Royal College of Physicians has said that it
“generally welcomes the first part of the Bill to enable the secretary of state…to establish a database of medical treatments. However, the RCP strongly recommends that the medical and research communities should lead in developing the database.”
If the Bill becomes law, it is very important for that to happen. I understand that the RCP has particular concerns about the second half of the Bill.
Let me also highlight what was said in the extensive discussion of the Medical Innovation Bill, which was launched in the other place. The chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, said that she was
“confident that, with the amendments made in Committee stage, the Bill is safe for patients and has the potential to encourage responsible innovation.”
She was referring to the provisions in the second half of the Bill. Sir Bruce Keogh, clinical director of NHS England said, in connection with the same provisions in the former Bill:
“Encouraging innovation in medicine and protecting patients are both of vital importance. This is why I am pleased that amendments have been devised to address concerns about patient safety.”
Sir Michael Rawlins, president of the Royal Society of Medicine said that the Medical Innovation Bill would
“allow responsible innovation in treatment...I believe that the use of the provisions in the draft Medical Innovation Bill will benefit patients, especially those with rarer diseases, and the furtherance of medical science.”
I appreciate that there are real issues of contention and debate, but I wanted to highlight the views of eminent people on both sides of the debate, of which the House should be cognisant.
I was particularly struck by the comments of the hon. Member for Lewisham East. At the end of the last Parliament, her predecessor as shadow Health Secretary said, interestingly, that he was “disappointed” that the Liberal Democrats had withdrawn their support for the Bill. He said that
“there should at least have been some cross-party talks about this”,
and I was glad to hear the hon. Lady echo that view this morning. He went on to say:
“The Bill was heavily amended and extra safeguards put in, and I worry a little bit that those who are opposed to it don’t realise that it is actually quite a different Bill now.”
He said that for parents whose children suffered from untreatable diseases and had no hope, the Bill was “about opening up hope”, and added:
“It is often parents who struggle to get their voice heard”.
In the other place, although some peers had concerns about the Bill, a number of others supported it. I have a list in front of me, which shows that the numbers were equal on both sides. It also shows that some pretty eminent peers supported the Bill: Lord Kakkar, Lord Patel, Lord Ribeiro, Lord Mackay, Lord Woolf, Baroness Gardner, Lord O’Donnell, Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Blencathra. Those are all eminent people in their fields. I am not suggesting for a minute that there is not a debate, but I think it is a genuine debate, which is, after all, what the House is here to provide.
The Government support the intention of the Bill to promote innovation, to reinforce existing medical negligence law, to promote the dissemination of information on innovations, to protect and reinforce the sovereignty and the freedom of clinicians to vary and innovate treatment in the interests of their patients, and to promote the use of identification and data on innovation as critical to 21st-century healthcare. We are—and I am— very concerned to ensure that the Bill promotes, rather than undermines, patients’ and doctors’ trust in the legal and regulatory framework for innovation, to ensure that it fits into the wider landscape and framework for innovation that I—along with various bodies—am putting in place, and to ensure that it reflects and supports the growing discussion about research medicine and innovation.
The House has many and varied ways of improving the lot of our citizens, and private Members' Bills are one important way. As you well know, Madam Deputy Speaker, we Ministers are normally sceptical about the virtues of private Members' Bills, and jealously guard our, and the Government’s, unique monopoly on legislative virtue and competence; but I believe that when a Bill—such as this Bill—seeks to do something that we support, even if the mechanics proposed may not yet be perfect, there is a strong argument for it to proceed to a Committee stage and be subjected to detailed scrutiny. I hope that the Bill is given such a hearing in Committee. The hon. Member for Lewisham East has signalled her willingness to work on a cross-party basis to try to get the Bill into a shape that will address the concerns that have been expressed, and I was delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes make a similar offer.
Heidi Alexander
I am slightly worried that the Minister is ascribing to me words that I have not used. I have indicated a willingness to work on a cross-party basis to address the barriers to innovation, but, as the Minister will have heard me say in my speech, I have very serious reservations about the Bill, and I intend to oppose it today.
Dr Wollaston
Perhaps the Minister will give me an opportunity to clarify my position as well. I shall robustly oppose the Bill’s Second Reading. As the Minister has said, we all support the principles and aims of the Bill, but many of us robustly reject the notion that this is the way in which to achieve them.
The Minister has quoted two bodies that he says support the Bill, one of which disagrees with half of it. Does he accept that the Association of Medical Research Charities, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the British Medical Association, the General Medical Council, the Patients Association, Action against Medical Accidents, and even the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry—as well as legal experts such as Sir Robert Francis—all oppose the Bill? It reads like an A to Z of opposition. All those bodies would work with the Government if the Bill were given a Second Reading, but they robustly reject the notion that this is the right way in which to achieve its aims. Does the Minister accept that list, and does he accept that, according to the vast majority of opinion, this is the wrong way forward?
George Freeman
I well accept that views on the merits of this Bill are divided, not least for the reasons I have highlighted in my speech. Some of the commentary on it, referring to it as the Mengele Bill for example, has played a very damaging part in misrepresenting—[Interruption.] I can show the hon. Member for Lewisham East the briefing after the debate if she would be interested.
It is important that colleagues decide for themselves whether to vote for this Bill. My own view, and the Government’s view, is that it is seeking to address a matter of public policy that we share in terms of promoting access to innovation. The measures in the Bill may not be quite perfect; it would not be the first Bill to be in that situation, and I dare say many of our proudest legislative breakthroughs going right back to the 18th and 19th centuries started in a format that possibly did not command unanimous support. I would have thought it is worth us debating this further in Committee, but I reiterate that if we cannot get a Bill into a position where it clearly has, and reinforces, public and clinician support from our world-leading expertise in research medicine and clinical practice, and if it any way undermines patient trust and confidence, it would be retrograde.
I think this Bill is trying to do something laudable, however; I think my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry is trying to do something laudable. This is a complex field, and the Government are trying to put in place the right measures, and I thank him for raising it—and I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to respond in full.