AstraZeneca

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I think it is undoubtedly a commercial decision. Having been head of R&D for a multinational pharmaceutical company, I know exactly how these decisions are made. It will have been a commercial decision as to where it needs to make the right investments for its vaccine manufacturing. I think the small change in the deal from the UK Government was probably a minor part in the overall decision-making.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

Given the fact that the project will not now go ahead and that we wish to be self-sufficient in the production of vaccines, what steps are the Government taking to ensure that we will be self-sufficient in producing vaccines going forward and not dependent on imports?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I refer the noble Baroness to the answer I gave earlier: the Moderna facility in Harwell is a massive new vaccine investment in this country; there is the BioNTech deal to bring that company here as well; and there are several other opportunities, including the life sciences innovation manufacturing fund of up to £520 million, which people are applying for at the moment. There is a lot more going on in vaccines now than there has been, but I am absolutely not complacent about this. It is an area we need to get right and an area where we need to make sure that the vaccine facilities are being used to produce vaccines on a daily basis—there is no good at all in having plants lying idle, waiting for something to happen.

Advanced Research and Innovation Agency

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I very much accept the thrust of the noble Lord’s point, which is that nationally we perhaps have more of a tendency to invent than to commercialise. As much as anything else, ARIA is in place to help address that.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, what is the potential relationship between ARIA and the Pioneer programme, which as we heard yesterday might replace Horizon if there is no agreement with the EU?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

Whether we reassociate to Horizon or go down the Pioneer alternative, ARIA is designed to be complementary to those programmes. It has a higher tolerance of risk and seeks more long-shot opportunities, one advantage of that being that rapid lessons learned can quickly be transmitted to organisations with a necessarily lower tolerance of risk, thereby allowing everybody to benefit from its learnings.