Antibiotic Resistance

Debate between Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park and Graham Stringer

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I am thrilled that despite my breaking two rules in a short time when I walked into the Chamber you are still allowing me to speak in the debate, Mr Chope. It is a pleasure to follow all the speeches, which have covered virtually all the angles. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) for securing the debate, and for the speech he made.

There is a depressing but nevertheless welcome consensus that we are losing our antibiotics to resistance, and effectively losing modern medicine as we know it. Notwithstanding the threat of Ebola it is hard to imagine a bigger health threat. The World Health Organisation has described antibiotic resistance as a bigger crisis than the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. If we lose antibiotics we risk the return of a time when basic operations will be deadly. I used to wonder what it would take to wake up the British establishment to that appalling threat. For years virtually nothing seemed to be done to combat the extraordinary phenomenon of antibiotic resistance. I thought, naively, perhaps, that once the health establishment blew the whistle, everyone else would fall into line and, fortunately, the health establishment has been blowing the whistle very loudly. We have heard various quotations today of the apocalyptic language of the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies. I think she has even used the term “apocalypse”. She has said that if we do not take action, deaths will go up and up, and modern medicine will be lost.

That is of course already beginning to happen. It is not a futuristic scenario. In 2006 there were just five cases in which patients failed to respond even to last-resort antibiotics in this country. Last year the number was 600. I know that there has been some action and I do not mean to disparage that. In March last year the Cabinet Office confirmed that it would examine the question of resistance as a national security issue. In September of that year it released an outline UK five-year antimicrobial resistance strategy. The Government have since set up a high-level steering group, chaired by Dr Felicity Harvey, the director general, public health, to implement the strategy once it is released, which I think will be later this year. All that is good news, and it is possible that the strategy will match the urgency of the situation. However, I am afraid that there are worrying signs that it will not.

Yes, there will be renewed efforts to develop new drugs, which is crucial. I was thrilled to hear the Prime Minister’s response to a question on the subject, during Prime Minister’s questions, when he briefly outlined the Government’s commitment to supporting the development of new drugs. That is obviously a prerequisite to solving the problem. There is nothing in the pipeline at all, and, as existing drugs become ineffective, we clearly must hope for new developments and do all that we can to facilitate them. There will also be renewed efforts to limit the inappropriate use of antibiotics in human medicine. That subject has been covered and I shall not dwell on it today. However, so far, successive Governments, including the present one, have resolutely avoided confronting a part of the problem that is not only huge but avoidable.

It is worth repeating that from day one, when Alexander Fleming accepted his part of the Nobel prize, he issued a dire warning. We have heard the quotation and I will not repeat it. The simple reality is that we have completely ignored that warning, more or less from the day he issued it. Instead of treasuring that miracle cure, we have squandered it—not just in hospitals but on intensive farms, and not just to treat sick animals but to keep animals alive in conditions where they otherwise would struggle simply to survive. That is not just a niche concern; 50% or thereabouts of the antibiotics that we use in this country are used on farms and it is even more in the United States and some other countries. Overall use per animal on UK farms is 18% higher today than it was a decade ago. That is disproportionately true of those antibiotics that are critical to human health.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important point: since tetracycline and penicillin-based antibiotics have been banned as growth promoters for farm animals, the use of tetracyclines has up gone tenfold and the use of penicillins has gone up fivefold. This is not a party political point: there is something that the Government can do immediately about that situation, which is to monitor and study it with a view to reducing the excessive use of antibiotics on farms.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and will come on to that briefly—I am going to try to keep my remarks short. That is exactly the point. Many people felt that the ban on the use of growth promoters back in—actually, I forget the year, but I think it was 15 years ago, although I may have got that wrong and am happy to be corrected—

Aviation

Debate between Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park and Graham Stringer

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that some of the problems that he has just described result not from lack of capacity but from poor prioritisation? Hundreds of flights every day to and from Heathrow involve places that do not in any way contribute to Heathrow’s hub status. We have short-haul flights, flights to Malaga and 15 flights a day to Cyprus. Such point-to-point flights could happen at any other airport. We have masses of spare capacity, but it is not all at Heathrow. If that is the problem, surely the priority is to make better use of existing capacity and to get rid of some of those pointless flights that could easily happen elsewhere.

[Graham Stringer]

I always find that a particularly difficult argument to be put by Conservatives, who suddenly want to plan routes and move away from a completely deregulated market in Europe—apart from where it is constrained by slots. Having argued ideologically for that position, all of a sudden they want to tell aeroplanes that they can only go from Manchester and Leeds and not from London. I do not believe that that is the Conservative party’s position at all. Even if we put up the price of slots, which has been kept artificially low by how slots are regulated, we would not necessarily get the flights going to the right parts of the world that will benefit this economy. We would get even more flights going to New York and the west coast of the United States because those are the most profitable routes from this country in the short term. The two cheap slots would not solve the problem because the central issue is lack of capacity.

I have a few more facts from the London chambers of commerce that represent the views of 350 business leaders from the BRIC countries: 92% made the general point about the importance of direct flights; 67% said that they were more likely to do business in a place if there were direct flights to it; and 62% said that they would only invest in an area if there were direct flights between the city in the country in which they were operating and the city in which they were likely to invest. Such flights to Brazil, Russia and China are limited.

I wanted to talk about the damage that air passenger duty is doing to regional airports, but I do not think that there is time because of the number of Members who wish to contribute to this debate. None the less, such duty is doing damage and the Government really need to change their policy. Twenty-two of our competitor countries in the EU have no air passenger duty whatever, so imposing a duty is a ridiculous anti-competitive position for this country to take.

I want to talk a little about how we use capacity in the regional airports. It is not possible to, as the hon. Members for Rochester and Strood and for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) suggested, somehow move flights about, but there is no reason whatever why we could not have a completely open skies policy in the regional airports. There is 15 times more capacity in our regional airports than would be provided by one extra runway at Heathrow. It would be against the law to direct flights within Europe to that runway; that simply could not happen. At the moment, airlines are reluctant to make use of the partial open skies policy in relation to major regional airports with fifth freedom rights, but the Government must agree that, and sometimes there are difficulties. Airlines, which have a real interest in getting into Heathrow, are suspicious that if they use the facility of partially open skies in the regional airports they will be kept out in any future negotiations to get into Heathrow. Having a completely open skies policy in the regions, however, might shift out one or two intercontinental routes. It will not change the whole structure of aviation, but it will help.

Finally, the central point of the Government’s policy, especially the Liberal Democrat part, seems to be that constraining capacity in the south-east will help the environment and not damage the economy. I hope that I have shown that that constraint in the south-east is already damaging our economic competitiveness, and the answer to that is to build extra runways and not a new airport. It is worth saying, and it has been said before, that our policy is damaging not only our economy, as we are, in effect, helping other hubs in France, Germany, Denmark, Spain and Holland to do better, but our environment. When planes take off from the United Kingdom, taking passengers to airports such as Schiphol to pick up intercontinental flights, they are putting more nitrous oxide, sulphur oxides and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than would otherwise be the case. Although the whole aviation debate needs to be opened up, the solutions have been known for a long time, and the Government have had their head in the sand for their whole time in office.