Newport Wafer Fab

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am not sure to which takeover the noble Lord refers that we did not intervene in—perhaps we should have a separate conversation about that. But it is clear that the Government as a whole have substantial power. As I said, the new NSI Act comes in on 4 January, when it will be commenced, but we have retrospective powers that can go back to November 2020 under that Act.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I go back to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, about a strategic overview. How many other firms in the semiconductor supply chain are foreign owned?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I do not have that information to hand. It would depend on what firms the noble Lord refers to and what form of suppliers they were. There are many hundreds of companies that serve some of these large manufacturing plants. As I said in response to an earlier question, we understand the importance of semiconductor manufacturers. We support this by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and we support the commercialisation of projects under the Compound Catapult, and we will continue to do so.

Life Sciences Industrial Strategy (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, it is getting late and I am speaking far down the list, so I shall try not to repeat what others have said. However, let me start by congratulating my noble friend Lord Patel and the committee on tackling this very important topic and pressing the Government on the urgent need for practical—I stress that word—and coherent steps for implementation. As I think every noble Lord has said, the life sciences and the wider health agenda are fundamental to our current and future prosperity. I am not going to comment on the issues of structures and leadership that other noble Lords have talked about but would simply note how vitally important they are in terms of making progress.

I must refer to staffing. Today’s press coverage and various briefings that we have all had highlight the fact that science is global, and we need a global workforce that can attract and retain the best. As we have just heard, there are massive risks here. Government support for this is vital and we need to keep a close eye—I hope that the committee itself will do so—on all the proposals on immigration that will come out, and that we will continue to argue for an approach that allows in the people we need. Also, it should not do that on an arbitrary salary level cut-off. The fact is that, in the academic and clinical fields, salaries are often low. People like research nurses are vital, yet they may well be earning below the salary levels proposed.

I turn to the NHS, on which I want to make three points. The first is about this being a two-way street. It is not just that the NHS can benefit innovation but that the NHS also benefits from innovation and development. Yesterday I spoke to Sir John Bell and he reminded me of this. He pointed out that recently he ran a competition for digital pathology which will be transformative. Our current ambitions, as he said, in early diagnosis may provide the best and cheapest route to improving outcomes in cancer. This will be absolutely central to the NHS, so there is potentially—although I stress the word “potentially”—an enormous win-win here.

However, that brings me to my second point: is what the Government are proposing to do to engage the NHS adequate, or is it that this is just another add-on from the point of view of the people who are trying to run the health service? Is it just another priority? Is it the centrepiece, as I think it was described in evidence to the committee? I can see how that will be a major obstacle. I have also noticed that other noble Lords have been talking about the fragmentation of approach; it being too little and too late, and about the need perhaps to mandate some of these changes. I also note the despair of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and am reminded of him chairing some 15 years ago the Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness Task Force with his normal energy and optimism. As a former chief executive of the NHS, and in fact the last chief executive who had a totally top-down structure, I will avoid being defensive about it and its ability to develop and tackle innovation. However, I recognise the description of the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, of the clinical reality of what is actually happening in the NHS from day to day.

I want instead to touch on the word “transformation”. My noble friend Lord Patel and other noble Lords have talked about the need for transformation, but let me make one point. This may be about organisational change but perhaps we need to reconceptualise the whole issue. What would it be like if we start to look at the NHS as an important driver in itself of the economy, as a part of the productive sector rather than just a cost? What I am talking about is not just its support as a base for the life sciences and other great developments but also its development of a productive workforce. It is interesting to note that NHS Improvement thinks that the aim is about productivity in the NHS. What about the productivity of the workforce being part of the aim of what the NHS is there for? Moreover, what about the costs of ill health, which are being recorded very clearly? A report by a UN High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, published about two years ago, developed the links between health systems—in particular, investing in the health workforce—and economic growth in different countries. That is extremely relevant here.

I think that if we started to reconceptualise the NHS as being part of our future prosperity, driving economic as well as social growth in the country, the Government might start to think rather differently about some of their policies. They might consider some of the things that the noble Lord, Lord Fox, talked about: empowering and resourcing people and, as I would put it, improving healthcare and health, rather than empowering and resourcing people to take on innovation. “Innovation” can be a slightly awkward term; what we are actually talking about is improving health, and I use the word “health” deliberately, having recognised in the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, that it is about health and not just about healthcare and health services. If we took a different approach to the NHS overall, would the policies be different and would the NHS be looking at these things in a different way? Would it want to be a much better partner than we have heard it is?

In saying that, I would note that if we did that, we would not be the first country to do so. South Korea has identified health as one of the great growth sectors. The South Koreans are determined to have one of the best health systems in the world and they are using their great enterprise and ability to create a much larger part of their economy based around health, which is in any case now the largest industry sector in the world. There are examples of that.

I want to touch on my third point before coming back to considering what the future might look like. The NHS is a part, and only a part, of an extraordinarily rich and deep infrastructure that both indirectly and directly supports research, innovation and development. We have heard points made about getting innovation into the NHS, but let us also remember the other factors. For example, it is where most of our homegrown clinical scientists are trained and educated. It also inculcates an important set of collaborative and public interest values into the whole approach to research. That helps to maintain the credibility of UK research in the world because it is based on a clearly objective set of values. These are some of the things that we should think about as regards the NHS.

I want also to widen the argument slightly. I would argue that we need to think further about the life sciences sector within a very wide cross-sectoral approach to health and biomedical and life sciences as a whole. In 2015, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health, which I co-chair, asked the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to write a report on The UK’s Contribution to Health Globally. It identified four sectors: government, which included the NHS and DfID; commerce, which included all the life sciences in the sense that we are talking about them here; academia; and the voluntary sector. When you map those things out, you find that there is an extraordinary infrastructure. As my noble friend Lord Bilimoria mentioned, the UK has three of the five top-rated medical schools in the world—including Cambridge, he will no doubt be delighted to know, along with Oxford. We have two of the four highest-rated medical research journals and the top science journal in Nature. We have an extensive reach into health issues that are not just about the UK in that we are leaders in research into malaria and into neglected tropical diseases. The UK has an extraordinary footprint which, when we looked at it, was second only to the US and indeed beat it in a number of areas.

At that time—this was pre the referendum—we were beginning to worry that we were mapping the UK’s contribution to health in its peak period. Of course, that really will be the position post Brexit, assuming that Brexit happens. We argued that we need policies that strengthen both the whole health sector and the connections between not just the NHS and life sciences but the four elements. We argued that we should aspire to be a global health hub, by which I mean a go-to place globally for all aspects of health, whether it is academia, life sciences, professional education, health systems or international development—all areas where we have extraordinary strength.

I note that Korea is clearly going down this route. It is equally clear from recent developments in the past year or so that both Germany and Japan are stepping up their development in health as part of their economic development and influence on the global stage. I would just say that it is ironic that, when we produced that report, we thought that greater collaboration with Europe was one of the steps we should take to make sure that this vision could come about, but I will not dwell on that point.

We have been asked by the Lancet, the Wellcome Trust and others to revisit the report to pick up on recent developments around Brexit, new developments in science—including AI, which has developed rapidly in the past three or four years—new policies that approach bits of the health system such as Health Education England and Public Health England, which are becoming much more global in their outlook, and a range of other issues. That is so that we can re-present a vision that says that, actually, life sciences need to be part of this wider approach to health and there are huge dividends and benefits to be had from that. As I said, health is the biggest industry in the world by some counts. Now, it seems more important than ever that we get behind this whole health sector in the widest sense, building links across the four elements with real strategic intent.

Finally, turning again to the report, I offer my congratulations on a timely and important contribution and on pressing for practical action in this vital area.

Industrial Strategy

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow on from the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and I shall pick up one or two of the points that he made. I shall talk mainly about biomedical and life sciences. I shall also try to be brief, partly because I am batting at No. 30 but partly because I am aware that my noble friend Lord Kakkar has already covered a great deal of this territory and I will try not to repeat what he said.

I had better declare an interest, as I am involved in various ways in the life sciences. Perhaps I should also mention that my son has recently benefited from changes, having become an innovation fellow of UK Research and Innovation at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. The LMB is an extraordinary symbol of the strength of the UK’s biomedical and life sciences. It is said that it has a Nobel Prize winner on every floor and it has more than one floor—I think that it has had 19 to date.

I welcome this strategy and approach. There have been some significant changes in this area already, but I want to refer to three concerns. My noble friend Lord Kakkar and I are part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health. The APPG mapped out the UK’s contribution to global health in four areas: in academia, commerce, government and the NGO sector. It demonstrated what we knew: that the UK was a global leader in these areas and that in academia, on some measures it beat the US as well as everybody else. There are some 4,800 biomedical companies, with a turnover of £55 billion. In Cambridge alone, there are 431 biomedical companies, already employing around 13,000 people. However, as we wrote the report, we came across the problem which the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, referred to in that we began to worry that we were simply mapping out the high points, the point at which historians might say that the UK was at its best in biomedical and life sciences, so we urged urgent action.

There has been some. Developments since then include Sir John Bell’s excellent report on a life sciences strategy. I know that my noble friend Lord Kakkar talked about that, so I will not. It and we argued for synergy across these sectors—between academia, commerce, government and NGOs—and asked how we could maximise that synergy.

The particular area that I will talk about, and my first concern, is the NHS. The NHS appears at the moment to be in decline, and it must be seen as part of the solution and not as a problem. There are three aspects here. First, the NHS should be a test bed for developments within the life sciences. It could accelerate adoption and be used in ways about which the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, spoke early on in this debate. There is a second role that the NHS plays in life sciences and biomedical research, which is about training and developing the talent. The clinical researchers who go on to work elsewhere have trained in the NHS. It provides massive strength as a foundation to this whole sector. The third aspect is that a healthy population is a boost to productivity. So the NHS is vital to the sector, yet it appears to be in decline. It is going the wrong way. There is a danger that the NHS will be blamed for not innovating when it is in this situation.

I was struck by what the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said about it not being surprising that Secretaries of State did not concentrate on industrial strategy because they were concerned with the issues of the day. That is even more the case, I suspect, for chief executives, chairmen and leading clinicians: their first problem is dealing with survival, particularly at the moment. My first concern is therefore whether the NHS is being supported enough to be able to support this industrial strategy.

My second concern links to that and to a wider point, which is the alignment of the strategy generally with the domestic policy agenda, which the British Chambers of Commerce has talked about that. That does not just mean alignment with education but includes some of the points that noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, made about morale, what society is like, who benefits, wider cultural issues and social enterprise. We have to go further, I suspect, in all those areas. We cannot concentrate on industrial strategy to the exclusion of others. I was struck by the way that the noble Lord, Lord Prior, pointed out that they should be same thing and there should be real alignment between these various areas of strategy. We see successful countries doing that. I was struck on a recent visit to Singapore by how it was focusing very much on the whole range of policy as it develops its strategy for the future.

On my third concern, staffing and migration policy, I shall simply quote from Sir John Bell’s report, which says that we should:

“Establish a migration system that allows us to recruit the best international talent”,


which,

“allows recruitment and retention of highly skilled workers from the EU and beyond, and does not impede intra-company transfers”,

when people are already in this country.

I am very positive about this strategy, and in many ways I see it as being very energising. Knowing people in the world of biomedicine and life sciences, I can see people being energised by recent developments, but I think there are three possible seeds of failures in what I have described here: in an NHS apparently in decline, in the non-alignment with all of our domestic policy and in immigration policy. I would be interested to hear the Minister address these three points.

Life Sciences Industrial Strategy

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Crisp]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the life science industrial strategy, published on 30 August, with regard to its findings on making the United Kingdom the best place for life sciences businesses to grow and on collaboration with the National Health Service.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Prior of Brampton) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government support the life sciences industrial strategy’s ambition to make the UK a global hub for clinical research and medical innovation, and are discussing the recommendations with industry and its key partners to agree a sector deal.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

I thank the Minister for that helpful reply, and am delighted to know that active discussions are going on. I have two specific questions. First, as the Minister will know, manufacturing in life sciences is the most productive part of the most productive sector of the UK, so what are the Government doing to attract more investment in that area? Secondly, and rather differently, what are the Government’s plans to support start-ups in totally new healthcare businesses?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, manufacturing is extremely important. As the noble Lord says, it is a highly productive sector of the economy. In the first wave of the industrial strategy fund, we are investing £146 million in medicine and vaccine manufacturing. With regard to investing in smaller companies, SMEs, we have a number of schemes that we are introducing, including supporting the AHSNs—the academic health science networks—and setting up innovation exchanges.