Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness and to pledge our support—I feel sure of that in this House—for what she is trying to achieve, in the light of what she has achieved so far. We all look forward to what the Minister will say in response to her plea.

This is a Bill that we can and should welcome, in many respects. For example, I share many of the ambitions mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, when he spoke. It sets out a necessary regulatory framework; my concern is that it comes with unnecessary risks as well. It spans the range of human and veterinary medicine. It includes clinical trials and the ability to prescribe. It addresses some of the abuses raised by the noble Baroness in her report, and it raises fundamental questions about capacity and professional standards. That means it is important, not least for the reasons which the noble Baroness has just explained in her example, that the balance between powers and accountability—between patient safety and risk—is got absolutely right. We will obviously probe this in detail as the Bill goes through the House.

I have two concerns. One is how patient safety can be protected within the context of creating an attractive environment, whatever that means. The other is the speed, direction and potential impact of the cumulative divergence from the stability and standards of inherited EU law. The Bill is designed to achieve just that and to accelerate it. Our task in this House is how to anticipate impacts and correct for perverse consequences. That is why I feel that the better purposes of the Bill are undermined by the fact that it is a skeleton Bill. We are not surprised, of course; this is what we have come to expect. Skeleton Bills have become not the exceptional position, as urged by the Constitution Committee, but the default position of this Government, who are so committed to accelerating deregulation and for whom, frankly, Brexit provides the obvious opportunity.

The first 15 clauses of the Bill consist entirely of powers to make provisions by regulations about human and veterinary medicine and medical devices. I hope that the House will challenge in particular the provocative powers of delegation in Clauses 1, 8 and 12, not least given the chaotic conditions that we seem to be approaching with no deal at the end of this year. However, it is the fundamental disregard for Parliament which explains the exasperation expressed by the Constitution Committee and the DPRRC in its report on the Bill, the latter in particular towards the flimsy and, frankly, disingenuous justifications that were offered for the use of powers.

Noble Lords will also find if they read the whole report that there is more than a disregard for the job of Parliament. In some cases, the suggestion is that the new powers offer the same restraints as the existing ones. They do not. This is why the Bill presents such a risk. The anticipated divergence is away from a stable regulatory framework into an unknown environment in ways that cannot be tested in this House because the design, as well as the delivery, is in secondary legislation. The Bill is divergence by delegation.

The Secretary of State has made no bones about this. At Second Reading in the other place he spoke of the Bill giving

“the means to depart from EU rules and regulations in future, moving at a faster pace … it ensures that we can easily amend regulation through secondary legislation without having to bring a new Bill”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/3/20; col. 659.]

The DPRRC has replied that the Secretary of State has taken upon himself

“very wide powers to almost completely re-write the existing regulatory regimes for human and veterinary medicines and medical devices.”

In the strongest language that I can remember, it describes the powers taken to allow regulations for making the disapplication of legislation subject to conditions set out in a protocol—whatever that might mean—as

“yet another example of ‘camouflaging legislation’.”

This is Parliament; this is our job: to expose legislation, not camouflage it. Will the Minister assure us that he will listen and respond positively to the call for restraints and the removal of those powers in the Bill that have been so insufficiently explained by the Government so far? He will save himself a lot of grief if he does.