Health and Care Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 5th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Motion D1. It is straightforward and I need not detain the House long. We all know the situation in Xinjiang province; it has been set out in graphic detail in this House by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others.

In recent years, the Government have procured billions of pounds’ worth of medical equipment sourced in whole or in part from Xinjiang. Despite widespread reports of forced labour in that region, our supply chain laws have failed to prevent such procurement. The Government have repeatedly condemned China over its treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province and has imposed sanctions in response to its human rights abuses. Indeed, my right honourable friend the then Foreign Secretary said that torture “on an industrial scale” was happening there. Then the new Foreign Secretary, my right honourable friend Liz Truss, told our ambassador to China that China was committing genocide—at last someone in the FCDO was admitting the truth. Everyone knows that it is genocide. The independent Uyghur Tribunal, the US Government, our own Parliament and five other Parliaments determined it.

However, every time we try amendments, however modest, on trade with companies using slave labour in Xinjiang, the Government throw a wobbly if we use the word “genocide” and give the usual, simply unbelievable answer that only a court can pronounce on that, despite there being no court capable of holding China to account. There have been an awful lot of government pronouncements in the past two days about Putin and Russia committing war crimes and atrocities, and rightly so, but there has been no suggestion of a court needing to pronounce on that. However, let us park all that.

The Government will not accept any amendment which remotely hints at genocide. So my amendment does not seek to go there. Instead, it uses the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which is already on the statute book. We sent a simple, three-section amendment to the Commons: first, to make regulations ensuring that the DHSC did not buy goods and services from a country which may be in contravention of the genocide convention; secondly, a Minister should assess whether there was a serious risk of genocide; and, thirdly, a Minister had to make that assessment if a chair of a Select Committee requested it. That was rejected in the Commons and the Government gave us back the complicated and rather complex Amendment 48A in lieu. As we see from the government amendment, the Secretary of State would have to carry out a review in case there was slavery and human trafficking. He would determine the scope of the review and what parts of the NHS it might apply to. Then he must lay it before Parliament within 18 months and give his own views on how he would mitigate it.

My amendment combines that government review amendment with a simple one-line clause. This one-line amendment was moved in another place by my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith MP and was supported by all Opposition Front Benches and Conservatives who included the former Secretary of State, Jeremy Hunt MP, and the latterly Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland MP. In the other place this simple amendment was rejected by my honourable friend Ed Argar MP. Now Ed Argar is a good Minister but someone drafting his speech obviously found an old “Yes Minister” script and wrote a classic Sir Humphrey response:

“In developing the modern slavery strategy review, it will continue to be important to engage across Government and civil society, nationally and internationally, to collect the necessary evidence to agree an ambitious set of objectives … We remain of the view that this is not the right legislation for the proposed changes.”


Can your Lordships not just hear Sir Humphrey adding, “A very courageous decision, Minister”?

Well, the right time is right now and the right legislation is this Bill. Of course, the Government always have a better Bill coming along in the future. The government amendment in lieu relies on the Modern Slavery Act, and so does mine, and while I criticise the obfuscating waffle of the government amendment in lieu, I am not attempting to replace it or reject but will support it. I am merely adding a one-line sentence to it. It is simple and does what the Minister in the other place said the Government wanted; that is, to

“further strengthen the ability of public sector bodies to exclude suppliers from bidding for contracts where they have a history of misconduct—or extreme misconduct in the case of slavery, forced labour or similar.”—[Official Report, Commons, 30/3/22; cols. 926-27.]

Ignoring the fact that genocide and slavery are a wee bit worse than misconduct, my amendment gives the Department of Health and Social Care the opportunity to desist from buying goods and services from anywhere practising modern slavery.

I do not blame those involved in procurement for the sorry fact that slave-trade goods have entered our supply chains. Those working in the Cabinet Office, NHS procurement and the Department of Health have worked jolly hard in very difficult circumstances over the past few years. The fault is not theirs. We clearly need better tools to keep slavery out of our supply chains and this neat little amendment would allow the Government to do exactly that.

We do not need to engage the whole of government, nor civil society here and abroad. After all, Dominic Raab has just cancelled a contract for solar panels on prisons because parts were made in Xinjiang province, and I am certain that he did not consult civil society here or overseas before doing so. If the Secretary of State for Justice can make that unilateral decision, so can the Department of Health and Social Care. Nor need we worry that we will be deprived of essential PPE from Xinjiang. On 31 March, I found the following announcement by the Department of Health and Social Care:

“Personal protective equipment for sale by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) including visors, gowns, aprons and goggles”,


alongside a link to a site listing:

“Various Locations - Online Auction of Pallets of New PPE Equipment to include Gowns, Visors, Goggles, Sanitizer & Aprons - NO RESERVE!”


Let us be honest: the DHSC is the Government’s biggest procurer and happens to be the department with the biggest problem. More than any other department, it needs extra help to keep slavery away. I am grateful for what my noble friend the Minister has said, but in view of the fact that the Government will not support my amendment, I regret that I shall have no option but to test the opinion of the House in due course.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I thoroughly endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has said. I find it extraordinary that the Government are taking such a slow pace in relation to the important issue he raises. Of course, I relate it to my own amendments on forced organ harvesting, which is yet another example of the deplorable behaviour of the Chinese authorities. I refer the House to the China Tribunal, led by Sir Geoffrey Nice in 2019, which stated:

“The Tribunal’s members are certain—unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt—that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”


Current human tissue legislation covers organ transplantation within the UK, but it does not cover British citizens travelling abroad for transplants. My amendment, which the House accepted, went to the other place. It was not accepted there but, as the Minister has kindly said, the Government put in their own amendment in lieu which we see here this afternoon. I am very grateful to the Minister for this. The impact of the Government’s amendment is to ensure that offences under Section 32 of the Human Tissue Act 2004, which currently prohibits people in this country from commercial dealings in human material for transplantation, will now be extended to acts outside the United Kingdom. The amendment covers people who give or receive a reward for the supply or for an offer to supply an organ or any controlled material. That is very welcome indeed. It is welcome because it deals with a gap in UK legislation, but it is especially welcome because it sends a powerful message internationally that the UK will not be complicit in this appalling crime. I am very grateful to the Minister and very much support the amendment he brings.

I now turn to my Amendment 57B, set out in Motion F1, which relates, as the Minister said, to issues to do with patient data and the proper protection of it. Laid out in the Health and Social Care Act 2012 is the concept of a safe haven for patient data across health and social care. Because of the sensitive nature of that data, I sought, and the House agreed, to keep those statutory protections in place and not allow NHS England to take on that responsibility because of a potential conflict of interest in that role.

The issue arises because, last November, the Secretary of State announced that NHS Digital and NHSX would merge with NHS England to accelerate the digital transformation of the NHS. The Bill gives the Secretary of State powers to do this by the transfer of a function from one relevant body to another. NHS Digital is currently the statutory safe haven for patient data and my concern is whether it is appropriate to place that responsibility in NHS England, in view of the inherent conflict of interest that might occur in its wider role. As a matter of principle, I and a number of other noble Lords consider that the collection, analysis and publication of public data should be independent of any operational body. In effect, NHS England will be able to decide that its legitimate interests override those of the citizen and the patient, with little or no external constraint or scrutiny.

The noble Lord and I are at one in wanting to speed up digital transformation. I will set out what I am trying to do here, with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. We are trying to be helpful. We want to make sure that the integrity of the safe havens is retained within this digital transformation. As the noble Lord said, we have had an extremely useful discussion with officials who are leading this programme in the department. I hope the Minister will be able to offer assurances that the integrity of the safe haven concept will be retained; that no transfer will take place until those safeguards are fully set out in the regulations necessary to bring the transfer into force; and, in particular, that strict governance arrangements will be put in place, subject to external independent scrutiny and oversight established on a statutory basis.

Can the Minister also confirm that the merged entity will at the least maintain the status quo of transparency and, indeed, go further for the patients whose data it is and whose trust and confidence are so necessary? Can he further confirm that a data usage register will be published which covers all projects accessing patient-level data and shows which data was accessed? Will the National Data Guardian be consulted on all this before the Government progress the regulations? Finally, will the Minister ensure that the regulations will avoid the need for NHS England—this was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones—to be in the difficult position of sending legal directions to itself, and can he say how in practice this would work?

Access to Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath

Friday 26th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for bringing the Bill to your Lordships’ House and I commend him for his perseverance and stamina as he sought to take it and the previous Bill through. I, too, pay tribute to the honourable Chris Heaton-Harris for taking the Bill through the House of Commons.

When the noble Lord opened his speech he referred to the adoption of new medicines, and I am very sympathetic to the point he raised. The fact is that we have a shocking record in the UK on the adoption of new medicines. We use fewer branded medicines per person than comparable countries; we tend to use older rather than the latest medicines; fewer patients in the UK receive new, innovative medicines than those in comparable countries; and we have a problem in that NICE-recommended medicines—even those that have been through the NICE process and have been shown to be clinically effective and cost effective—face further reviews and restrictions at local level, even though there is a legal requirement on clinical commissioning groups to make sure that NICE technology appraisals are put into action. For me, that adds to the concerns of the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Ryder, about the position of the UK when it comes to investment in R&D by the pharmaceutical sector. We know that we have a very strong science base and at the moment we have a strong pharma R&D base, but those are at risk, partly for the regulatory reasons that noble Lords have already referred to. I do not think that that is so much the case in this country but I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ryder, about European regulation.

The other big problem we have is that the NHS is hopeless at adopting new medicines. We have the Hugh Taylor Accelerated Access Review, which has been sponsored by Mr George Freeman, to whom I pay tribute for the work he is doing in this area. The review has produced an interim report and the final report will come out in the summer. It is concerned with access to innovative drugs, devices and diagnostics, which it aims to speed up. But however good the recommendations are and will be, unless the NHS and NHS England completely change their perspective and recognise that we have to adopt these fantastic new innovations that are coming to the UK or are developed here, in the end we will not be seen as a country in which it is worth investing. My experience—it may also be the noble Lord’s experience—is that the big problem is that there is a culture within the NHS that regards drugs as a cost rather than a benefit to patients. There is a need to take a very different approach, even in relation to new equipment and clinical staffing. There is a huge cultural barrier that we have to face up to.

Noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, mentioned that we have received briefings from a number of medical bodies—the ABPI, the BMA and many of the royal colleges—which are still expressing concern, even though the Bill has changed considerably since the noble Lord took it through in the last Session. We know that they still have some concerns about the database and about what they regard as the perverse incentives. Is the Minister confident that his department can help to assuage those concerns? If we are to see this Bill progress—and we all want to see the benefit that the noble Lord wishes to bring to healthcare in the UK—it is important that there be some way of reassuring those bodies that what is intended here will not put at risk some of the things they have put forward.

I also hope that the noble Lord will respond to my noble friend Lord Murphy on the very important point about off-patent drugs. I am not convinced that the authorities in the UK have ever understood the importance of making progress in this area. In the end, only Ministers can kick people to make progress. I agree with him—let us hope that this database is at least a start in giving prescribers confidence to prescribe off-patent drugs.

Finally, I come to the recommendations in the Delegated Powers Committee’s report published on 25 February. I do not know whether the noble Lord has seen it but it makes reference to this Bill and I am slightly concerned about it. The committee is concerned about Clause 2, which,

“enables the Secretary of State, by negative procedure regulations, to confer functions on the Health and Social Care Information Centre … in connection with the database”.

In particular, the regulations may include requiring or authorising the centre to disclose information to specified persons. The Delegated Powers Committee has no problem with the use of subordinate legislation to do that, nor with the use of the negative procedure, but it says that,

“clause 2 appears to envisage no provision, either in the Bill itself or in the regulations, for the enforcement of conditions imposed by virtue of subsection (4)(b), and we draw this matter to the attention of the House so that it may seek an explanation, either from the Member promoting the Bill or from the Minister”.

I do not expect the Minister to be able to respond today. However, if the committee has identified a drafting issue, the question of how it is going to be dealt with is a concern.

I end with the point that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, made about timing. Presumably, he is basing his assumption on the Commons rising in May, but he seemed to be saying that 11 March would be the last time in this Session that the Commons would deal with it.

[Lord Blencathra]

My assumption is not based on when the Queen’s Speech would be or when the Commons rises. In the Commons, the days for Private Members’ Bills are announced at the start of the Session, and Friday 11 March has been announced as the last day. Even if the Commons ran into June or July, there would not be an extension beyond 2.30 pm on Friday 11 March.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

But on that basis, even if there were no Committee or Report stage, it would still be too late. Will the Minister join me in asking the usual channels whether we can find some time before 11 March to take this Bill through, even if the Government may need to table a technical amendment? Obviously, a recommendation from the Delegated Powers Committee cannot be ignored. We on this side of the House would certainly support the Minister in doing that.