NHS: Cancer Treatments

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Jowell for an extraordinary speech, full of passion, compassion and hope. I had the great privilege of following her as a Minister at the Department of Health: what a formidable reputation she had as our first Public Health Minister and what a legacy she left. Many of today’s public health programmes which are taken for granted she established in those first two crucial years. I do not know whether she knows that I have not quite forgiven her for her other big decision at Richmond House, which was to get rid of chocolate biscuits and bring in fruit bowls instead. What she does not know is that a certain Minister of State not a million miles from where she is sitting had a secret cache of those biscuits—my noble friend Lord Hutton became very popular for having meetings in his own ministerial room.

My noble friend Lady Jowell has raised a huge question about access for NHS patients to innovative treatments. In a sense, that is the great paradox of health in this country. We have an NHS that we are enormously proud of. It is still very well regarded internationally. We have an incredibly strong life sciences sector, with over £60 billion of turnover and over 200,000 high-quality jobs. We have one of the strongest pharmaceutical industries in the world: 25% of all global medicine is developed in the UK. Then, as the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, and my noble friend Lord Turnberg said, we have the great paradox; it is a British problem too. We have this great development, this great invention, but we are slow to adopt it. The experience of my noble friend Lady Jowell and so many other NHS patients is the same. If we look at other countries, such as Germany and France, we can see that their patients have much more access to innovative treatments than we do in this country.

When my noble friend was a Minister, she had the first discussions about the establishment of NICE, which was set up to deal with this British problem. It was calculated that it took 15 years for a proven new innovative treatment to be adopted generally in the health service. Here we are, nearly 20 years later, still facing the huge problem of innovation adoption. It is true that the Government have established the accelerated access review; they also have a life sciences strategy, post Brexit. However, we have to do much more. Of course finance is important, but the Minister will know that it is not just about finance—it is about attitude. I hope that the one message he will take away from this extraordinary debate and from my noble friend is that we have to do better in the NHS to adopt the huge innovation that so often takes place in our country.