Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Lord Lea of Crondall

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 24th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

I am sorry—the noble Lord, Lord Patel, is here. I meant to say the noble Lord, Lord Bethell. I apologise for my senior moment.

I will begin again. I rise to speak on behalf of my noble friends Lady Blackwood and Lord Bethell, neither of whom is in their place. I should, out of an abundance of caution—particularly given how well I have spoken so far—declare the interests of both my noble friend Lady Blackwood and me, as the present and past chairs of Genomics England.

In speaking to Amendments 79 and 196, we wish to support the noble Lords, Lord Sharkey, Lord Kakkar and Lord Patel, in calling for trusts and integrated care boards to have a duty to conduct research and to report on the steps they have taken to deliver it. We know that there are excellent research-active NHS organisations in the UK, ranging from our acute tertiary university hospitals, such as Oxford, to our district general hospitals, such as Portsmouth.

There are many initiatives to promote research, such as Saving and Improving Lives: The Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery, which sets out a bold and exciting vision. In particular, my noble friends and I await with interest the Find, Recruit and Follow-up service, which plans to use digital tools to identify patients who may be suitable subjects for research. When speaking to patients, one of the refrains that we all hear most often is that they find it hard to find suitable clinical trials, and we welcome any initiative that can make it easier for patients to take part in clinical research.

As well as supporting patients in finding trials, we need to make it as easy as possible for them to participate. In some cases, the pandemic has accelerated a move towards remote monitoring tools—wearables and other devices that allow individuals to participate in trials while reducing the number of visits they have to make to hospitals. We welcome the NIHR remote trial delivery toolkit, which makes recommendations on how some of these positive practices can be continued and so broaden participation and promote patient retention in a beneficial way.

My noble friend Lady Blackwood, as a rare disease patient herself, knows that clinical research is often the only way for patients to get access to innovative treatment. Yet we are saddened to see, in the annual NIHR publication on initiating and delivering clinical research, that some trusts are still not delivering trials every quarter. We continue to see a large disparity in the number of trials being offered in each trust, which leads to a postcode lottery. Those individuals fortunate enough to be under the care of a research-active hospital have an increased chance of being recruited on to a trial, and therefore have better outcomes than patients under the care of less research-active hospitals.

Patients admitted to more research-active hospitals also have more confidence in staff and are better informed about their condition and medication. And as the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, has said, there is very clear evidence that research-active trusts deliver better outcomes—in part, I am sure, because of their ability to retain and energise staff, as the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, has mentioned.

The last couple of years, however, have been challenging for the health research community. In 2020, the Association of Medical Research Charities predicted a £320 million shortfall in research spending, forcing many medical research charities to make tough choices about which projects to prioritise. Data also suggests that the UK has been slower to return to pre-pandemic levels of commercial clinical research compared with other European countries.

The Life Sciences Vision sets out the Government’s objective to be a science superpower, but this requires research to be embedded in every part of the NHS, including primary, community and mental health services. That will happen only if NHS organisations, including the new integrated care boards, have a duty to conduct research, as these amendments propose.

In addition, we all know that what gets measured gets done, which is why these amendments place a duty on trusts and ICBs to report the steps that they are taking to deliver clinical research in their annual reports or forward plans. This not only enables progress to be tracked but helps patients understand what research is being done in their area and will encourage NHS organisations to invest in research that meets the needs of their local communities and—

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-Afl)]

I am sorry to intervene. I am fascinated by everything that is being said but, given the cliché that money does not grow on trees, I am a bit surprised that we have not heard as much as we might have about international collaboration. Is that not a big deal? How would that be measured, as it were, as compared with the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, has already raised?

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

I personally believe that international collaboration and engagement in research across all parts of the United Kingdom go hand in hand. It should not be either/or; it is a combination, and we need to do both. The amendments that I am speaking to call for every NHS organisation to participate and become research active.

Finally, and briefly, I urge the Minister to embrace this opportunity to embed what is genuinely cross-party support for clinical research in legislation. We all want to put the UK on the path to being the best place in the world to participate in health research. We will do that, as the noble Lord suggests, by collaborating internationally, but we will address the health inequalities that we have all spoken about over the many days of Committee only if all NHS trusts have a duty to conduct research.

Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Debate between Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Lord Lea of Crondall

Tuesday 3rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and will take the illustration of the insurance industry. There are special features connected with the insurance industry. Hence, it has its own legislation. However, the Minister dealing with what was then the Insurance Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Newby, indicated that other steps and avenues would be pursued to see that the insurance industry could be brought within the scope of some statutory obligations on late payment.

The history of this, briefly, in the insurance industry is as follows. Lloyds of London has unilaterally been able to veto a strong recommendation from the Law Commission which was accepted by everybody else in the industry, including all the main insurance companies, that there be such a statutory duty in that sector so it could be brought into line.

Evidence from other sectors, including overseas parts of the industry, shows that the present arrangement, whereby London has no such guarantees against late payment, is doing serious reputational damage to that major industry. However, the rubric has it that one actor in that industry, namely Lloyds of London, which represents maybe 25% of the industry, which we all agree is not insignificant, can cast such a veto in its own interests against public policy, government legislation, simply by stating—this is the astonishing point—that it finds such a clause, recommended strongly and unanimously by the Law Commission, “controversial”. In other words, to deem a clause such as that to be controversial means that the Bill would fall.

Therefore, in Committee, some noble Lords who supported the amendment generally did not want to take that risk. However, the Minister in that context, in seeking the withdrawal of the amendment, undertook to pursue the issue on the basis that it was not going to be left there and that other means—other legislation—would be explored and pursued. This amendment is a good exemplar of how that commitment should be honoured.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak against these amendments. I must first declare an interest because I run a large public company, TalkTalk, which would clearly be subject to this legislation.

I agree with the Government’s prompt payment proposals, and it is worth us pausing to recognise how robust they are and how tough a reporting requirement this will be. To report quarterly in detail on your payment performance and policies is more detailed than the report I have to make on the financial performance of my company. I have an obligation to report in full on a half-yearly basis. I would not underestimate the power of transparency—of having to report this publicly and clearly. We see this in a whole range of compliance areas in business. Having to explain publicly to your customers as much as to your suppliers what you are doing acts as a strong brake on bad behaviour and is the beginning of the culture change in payment policy that I am sure that all sides of the House want to see.

I am not persuaded, however, by the Opposition’s amendments. There is a real danger that we try to overcomplicate and second-guess how businesses will wish to negotiate with each other. There are also a lot of unintended consequences—I am sure that they are genuinely unintended—in the Opposition’s amendments that will simply lead businesses to avoid the provisions and will create the very problem that they are seeking to avoid, which is the negotiation of much longer payment terms that meet all the requirements of a much more tightly defined code but actually do not enable small businesses to be paid faster.

It is therefore important that we support the Bill and the improvement in publicising and shining a light on poor payment policies and performance. But we in this House must not think that we can create culture change by specifying in ever more precise detail what businesses can and cannot do. That would have the opposite effect on the culture that we are trying to change.