Pharmaceutical Research and Development Spending

Lord Goodlad Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Goodlad (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, on initiating this timely debate and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for stepping in and speaking so knowledgeably and authoritatively. As she said, this country is a world leader in the life sciences, and we now face serious but welcome competition from Europe, the United States, China and elsewhere.

An area of opportunity to attract increased pharmaceutical investment into the United Kingdom is dementia research. Dementia is among the world’s greatest health challenges. It has a large patient population, with many millions of people worldwide living with the condition and increasing demand for treatment. Currently, no treatments are available to stop, slow or cure the diseases that cause dementia, hence the pharmaceutical industry’s recognition of the opportunity and necessity for investment in this field. There have been research breakthroughs recently and there is now a pipeline of promising treatments. It is widely believed in the industry that we are at a tipping point for progress.

Over the last five years, we have unfortunately seen an overall decline in the number of dementia trials being initiated in this country and the number of participants in each trial. Government investment in dementia research, which is smaller than that of industry, fell from £83.9 million in 2018-19 to £15.7 million in 2019-20, putting us at risk of falling behind our global competitors.

The Government recently announced the national dementia mission, which will hopefully be a galvanising body like recent task forces in other fields. They have also announced a 10-year plan for dementia focused on supporting and expediting clinical trials. In August, they recommitted the £160 million of funding promised in the 2019 election manifesto, described then as the “dementia moonshot”. It would be helpful if the Minister, whom I congratulate on his appointment and welcome to this Committee for the first time, could today or, more realistically, very soon flesh out how these commitments are to be implemented. To do so would be an important signal to the pharmaceutical and global life science industries that this country’s ambitions in this important area are a serious reality.

It would also be a signal to the people of this country that the Government are serious about dementia, the leading cause of death for women for more than a decade and the fastest-growing health condition in the UK. As well as the suffering and distress it causes, it is predicted to be the most expensive health condition to treat by 2030. Dementia, directly or individually, affects very nearly every family in the land. Attracting investment and research into the condition should be a very high priority for the Government.