Mesothelioma (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Friday 20th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a terrific debate so far and I congratulate all noble Lords who have contributed to it. I do not usually like to write out my speeches but, for some reason, I made an exception in this case—although I did not write it out but dictated it to a computer and the computer typed it out, which is utterly amazing and relevant to what I am going to say. However, I have noted down so many contributions from other noble Lords that the whole strategy has been completely messed up.

I pay tribute to the superannuated choirboy, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for his extraordinary work. I am not sure whether or not that was a compliment, but it will stick with him. I join others in congratulating him on the extraordinary work that he has done to promote the cause of those suffering from this horrible disease. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for the work he has done alongside us and the British Lung Foundation for being an enormous source of support so far.

As other noble Lords have said, it is difficult to calculate with any accuracy the true level of risk of mesothelioma to members of the population. The usual estimates suggest that 60,000 people will die of the disease in the UK by 2025 if appropriate treatments are not found. However, the real number could be considerably higher because, as other noble Lords have said, asbestos is coming to light in buildings and enterprises where its existence was previously unsuspected. I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, spoke up as he did because we must accept that this is a global issue and that we must contribute to it on a global level. The number of people scheduled to die of the disease in the developing world if we do not find breakthroughs is 1 million, but that is a minimum estimate and it could be several times that. We should make a contribution to research not only in this country but should network with researchers across the rest of the world.

As other noble Lords have said, mesothelioma is often seen essentially as a phenomenon of the past. After all, asbestos is no longer used in industry—at least in this country—or in construction. Hence many of the debates about it have concentrated on providing compensation for sufferers who, after all, developed the malady through absolutely no fault of their own. In my view, it is still right and proper to press the industries responsible, plus the insurance industry, to increase the existing levies that have been agreed, and other noble Lords have made this point. My noble friend Lord Wills effectively pointed out that it would save the country money rather than produce extra costs.

However, I argue strongly that we should see mesothelioma as a disease that is relevant to our future, not just to the past, and not accept that it is a malady for which there is no possible cure or effective mode of treatment. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, and my noble friend Lord Winston, I am not a medical expert. However, I have spent the past few years working on the digital revolution and studying its likely impact on the outer edges of medicine. I have said this before in your Lordships’ House: the digital revolution is the greatest, fastest and most global technological revolution we have ever lived through. It is moving vastly faster than the original Industrial Revolution and has amazing potential applications to the frontiers of medicine.

For that reason, I think that we are living through what could well be a period of quite unparalleled innovation in medicine and other frontier areas of science more generally. There are three reasons for this and they are all bound up with the digital revolution. The first is that the emergence of hugely powerful supercomputers gives us an opportunity to decode genetic chains in a way that would have been impossible even a few years ago. Secondly, these capacities overlap with major advances in fundamental areas of genetics as such. My noble friend Lord Winston made the point really effectively in the debate, as did the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar. Mesothelioma should no longer be treated as simply an isolated disease. Thirdly, because of the advance of digital technologies and global communications, scientists are able to share data sources in an immediate fashion across the world.

Because of the advances in genetics, as I have just mentioned, we have come to see that mesothelioma is not a disease apart. As my noble friend Lord Winston stressed, research into mesothelioma can draw on work from outside the sphere of the illness itself and, crucially, it can contribute to our understanding of other forms of cancer. We have made significant advances in our understanding of the mutations that allow uncontrolled cellular multiplication and spread. Some such mutations are shared in common by a range of tumours, so our understanding of the genetic components in question can in principle be generalised. In the near future, cancers are likely to be identified by their particular mutations rather than by their site of origin—for example, lung cancer and breast cancer. Treatments developed on this basis are already so successful in some areas that they allow for normal life until a person dies of other causes.

In the past, we know that at least some talented researchers tended to steer clear of mesothelioma precisely because it was seen as a residual disease. Given the innovations mentioned above, the situation could be very different in the future. Therefore systematic research into mesothelioma could have a crucial impact on medicine going forward. It could be relevant to other environmental diseases because it takes 30 or 40 years to come out. We live in a world in which we are ingesting any number of new substances, so we have to try to have a proactive, preventive strategy for that. Studying mesothelioma could illuminate these areas too. I therefore hope very much that the Minister will investigate the possibility of the Government providing funding to help to establish a national mesothelioma research centre, as other noble Lords have mentioned. I have reason to believe that we can get substantial funding from private sources, so if that could be matched we could get the whole enterprise off the ground.

Everyone else has mentioned Winston Churchill, so I may as well end with a Winston Churchill story, given that I have not spoken for that long. I used to be the head of the London School of Economics, one of whose founders was George Bernard Shaw. He had an acerbic relationship with Winston Churchill. The story goes like this. George Bernard Shaw wrote to Winston Churchill saying, “Dear Winston, here are two tickets for the first night of my new play. Please bring a friend, always assuming you have a friend”. Winston Churchill wrote back saying, “Dear Bernard, I am sorry, I cannot make the first night. Please send me tickets for the second night, always assuming there is a second night”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

We probably cannot today sort out the figures in the way we would like. It will be very difficult to allocate some of the more generic research expenditure. Let us move on from funding, if we can.

[Lord Giddens]

Will the Minister get to work on this and send something back about what the precise figures seem to be in the light of the questions raised? This is a serious issue, so it would be good to get a response from the Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I thank the noble Lord for that comment. We in this country are often highly self-critical but actually we have a remarkable record on research. We have three of the top medical academic institutions in the world in this country: Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. We have UCLH, King’s and Manchester. We have some extraordinary research organisations in this country. There is, I guess, an issue over quality and quality control. There are an awful lot of clinicians who do research that may not be to the—

[Lord Giddens]

I am sorry to give the Minister such a torrid time, but I hope he recognises that he should look internationally. There are important models in other countries, such as the Pacific Lung Health Centre, which is integrated with the wider lung foundation and has produced significant research. We should not just think nationally; we should look at other models and see how they could be adopted here to deal with the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Winston, rightly raises. As I tried to stress, mesothelioma shares things in common with other cancers and, now that we have got to a deep enough genetic level to be able to understand why some of these processes happen, I think it would be worth while to get some information on what exists elsewhere to see how far it could be applied here.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I agree.