Pharmaceutical Research and Development Spending

Baroness Wheeler Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Wheeler]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to increase the United Kingdom’s share of global pharmaceutical research and development spending.

[Baroness Wheeler (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to open this debate on behalf of my noble friend Lord Hunt, who sadly cannot be here today. As we know, this subject is dear to his heart and I am sure that the expertise of all noble Lords who will be speaking will do this important and vital issue full justice. I welcome the new Minister to his first Lords debate response and wish him well in addressing the mound of questions that he will face.

Our country faces a challenging time as we look to build back stronger from the impact of the pandemic. It has hit our people, our businesses and our growth hard, but here in the UK we already have a globally leading life sciences industry which, if we take the appropriate steps, can be central to unlocking our economic recovery. The industry currently makes up 18% of all R&D investment across the UK economy. It is the largest private R&D spending sector. In 2020, it was worth £5 billion and contributed more than half a million jobs to the UK.

Existing literature suggests that every pound invested in private R&D today leads to a stream of future benefits to the economy as a whole, equivalent to 50p per year in perpetuity. This sector’s R&D brings these benefits across a diverse geographic presence, with significant hubs in the south and north of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. With private capital and UK industry playing the largest role in pharmaceutical R&D, they need policy stability and consistency in order to feel confident in investing. The Government must help, not hinder, this.

This kind of R&D has huge value for the NHS and its patients, not just through the end-stage innovation that is produced but through clinical trials. These are a valuable source of revenue to the NHS and provide access to medicines for patients with limited or no-treatment options in routine care, such as people with cancer, dementia and rare diseases.

The UK has the potential to be a global leader in life sciences R&D. We have a mature ecosystem, have historically been a leader in early-stage clinical research and have made huge strides with early access to advanced therapy medicinal products. However, this debate is vital today because of deep concerns that the UK is slipping against our competitor countries in a number of key areas. Between 2012 and 2019, the UK’s share of global pharmaceutical R&D expenditure fell from 7.7% to 4.1%. This has led to a loss on average of £3.2 billion per year for the past eight years. Since 2009, our manufacturing production volumes have fallen by 29% and 7,000 jobs have been lost and, between 2018 and 2020, the UK slipped down the global rankings across all phases of industry clinical trial delivery.

We can and must do something now. Urgent implementation of the Life Sciences Vision—it has been welcomed by the sector, which co-developed it—is now critical as the UK’s international competitors, spurred on by the pandemic, are moving at pace to enhance their life sciences offer and capture internationally mobile investment. Can the Minister say when the promised implementation plan for the one year anniversary of the vision, due last July, is to be published? Can he also reaffirm that the Government remain committed to the vision, not least its core ambition to make

“the UK the best place in the world to trial and test products at scale”?

The current uncertainty is not helping the deeply worrying situation that we are in. Moreover, an effective, joined-up approach is also needed on the Government’s wider overall science research and development strategy. We have had a number of separate R&D roadmaps, science plans, strategies and sector deals, ARIA and two reorganisations of the UKRI, for example, but without overall coherence across the board.

I will make a few points on specific issues, which I am sure will be followed up by noble Lords. First, as I have said, despite a strong policy ambition to make the UK a destination of choice for cutting-edge research, the delivery of industry clinical trials within the NHS is in crisis. In addition to the impact on patients, this means less R&D investment in the UK. The pandemic obviously had an impact, but it cannot be ignored that the UK was beginning to decline pre Covid.

Secondly, the use of health data is an area of vast potential, but we have had several false starts, for example care.data and the more recent GPDPR incidents. The data revolution is increasingly fuelling new breakthroughs in treatment, diagnostics and patient pathway redesign and is a key tool to support NHS staff. Given its large and diverse patient pool, the NHS has unique potential to be one of the most effective engines for data research. However, although this potential is well recognised, repeated attempts by successive Governments have failed to make best use of this resource, predominantly as a result of failing to engage both public and clinicians. As a result, the current state of play is a disparate data environment, with many custodians, different access arrangements and a lack of interoperability.

The Government’s Data Saves Lives strategy has taken on board many of the recommendations put forward by Professor Ben Goldacre in his independent review. Stakeholders such as the ABPI, which represents the research-based pharmaceutical sector in the UK, are urging that this must be a comprehensive strategy that appropriately balances the need for effective safeguards and public engagement with the ability of accredited researchers to appropriately access data to perform valuable research.

The false starts suffered from a chronic lack of co-ordination and failure to integrate effective communication with policy development and technical implementation. Provided that we can learn from these past mistakes, pressing forward will significantly enhance UK attractiveness as a destination for research. Will the Minister update the House on the action that the Government are taking?

Thirdly, the key issue is how we make the NHS an innovation partner—one of the areas with which we are struggling most. The life sciences sector is a strongly interconnected ecosystem. An NHS that supports innovation is central to this ecosystem and for that reason is one of the preconditions of success for the Life Sciences Vision. However, right now, the NHS struggles to approve these medicines for use and to provide access for patients once they are approved. Just 68% of medicines approved by the European Medicines Agency were made available in England between 2017 and 2020.

Looking at the uptake of medicines recommended by NICE, we see that the use of these in the UK typically lags behind that in other countries for at least five years after launch. For example, between 2016 and 2020, UK uptake was 60% of the average of 15 comparator countries in the first three years and still below average after five years, despite rising to 81%. This is contributing to patient outcomes falling behind those in countries in Scandinavia, as well as the Netherlands and Spain, for example. Recent data highlights how the UK ranks 17th out of 18 countries for life expectancy, is the worst for stroke and heart attack survival and ranks 16th out of 18 for five types of cancer.

Supporting access to and uptake of innovative medicines is critical not only to delivering better patient outcomes but to creating a thriving life sciences ecosystem. It is because of this link that in 2017 this House secured the amendment to the medical supplies Act specifically recognising that, when enacting policy in the scope of the Act, the Government must take due consideration of the consequences for the life sciences industry and the UK economy that depends on it.

Will the Minister say what action he will take to ensure that patients can benefit from the latest medicines and that the NHS supports a thriving life sciences sector in the UK? Specifically on the UK’s vaccination programme, so vital in the battle against Covid, how do the Government aim to deliver their pledge to develop new vaccines within 100 days? Will the Government continue with their plan to sell off our flagship vaccine manufacturing centre in Oxford? Does this not fly in the face of an effective pharma strategy and send out completely the wrong signals abroad?

In conclusion, recent analysis suggests that effective endorsement and delivery on the Life Sciences Vision could generate an additional £68 billion in GDP over the next 30 years through increased R&D alone and deliver 85,000 jobs through increased exports. We can also ensure that new medicines in the UK continue to be developed, trialled and launched here, meaning that patients benefit from the most innovative treatments in the world. This should be at the heart of the Government’s priorities to deliver growth and place the NHS on a sustainable footing for the future. The Government must act swiftly and decisively to reverse the very worrying downward trends in our life sciences competitiveness in relation to the rest of the world.