Catapults (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I join noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Mair for the very thoughtful way in which he introduced this debate on the excellent report of your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee on catapults and their contribution to the innovation landscape, so remarkably well chaired by my noble friend Lord Patel. In so doing, I declare my interests as chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research, chairman of King’s Health Partners and chairman of UK Biobank.

As we have heard, there is no doubt that catapults have established themselves as playing a fundamental role in the UK innovation landscape. One of the most important areas of the economy with regard to innovation and economic development is, of course, the life sciences. The life sciences sector provides some 250,000 skilled and highly skilled jobs in the UK economy, and in 2019 contributed £80 billion to it. But the footprint for life sciences in the United Kingdom is truly global: 25 of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies and 30 of the world’s leading medical technology companies are responsible for 24% of the employment in UK life sciences and 37% of the turnover attributed to life sciences in our country. It is therefore critical that the environment that Her Majesty’s Government are able to facilitate and foster for innovation and economic development as a result is attractive not only domestically but to global participants, who may wish to invest in and continue to sustain UK life sciences.

We have heard in this debate about Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to increasing R&D expenditure, and that is of course broadly welcome. In 2020, public contribution to R&D expenditure in our country reached £15.3 billion, an increase of £1.7 billion on the previous year, fulfilling the Government’s commitment, but when one looks at that public contribution to R&D funding, £6.1 billion came from UKRI—40%, the largest single public contribution to R&D expenditure. Therefore, it is vital that the funding formulae and rules that attend UKRI are conducive to supporting the broadest possible base for R&D activity in our country.

We have heard that a number of catapults were first established in 2010-11 and thereafter in 2015, and two are relevant specifically to UK life sciences: the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult and the Medicines Discovery Catapult. The Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, as an example of the success of catapults, is quite striking. It was established with great foresight and imagination at a time where there was recognition of an emerging technology—cell and gene therapies—to be applied not only to treat but potentially to cure diseases. We have seen a rapid advance in the technological base for cell and gene therapies, contributing at pace and increasing scale to the management of many diseases.

However, it is interesting that the area around Stevenage, the home of the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, is also the world’s third largest cluster of cell and gene therapy companies. In establishing the catapult, the innovation landscape has not only established the opportunity to house essential technology and equipment but provided the opportunity for nascent and established businesses to test their innovation, establish their credentials and ensure their broader application generally in healthcare. It has also encouraged the development of many novel businesses in the location and their taking advantage of those opportunities to ensure the development of jobs and economic activity.

Your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee report identified a critical anxiety regarding funding rules attending the opportunity for catapults to avail themselves of Research Council funding and to be in a secure position to take full advantage of public funding made available by Innovate UK. These are two critical issues that my noble friend Lord Mair touched on in his presentation of the Committee’s report. I should declare that I was a member of your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee. In making recommendations 3 and 4, we highlighted the repeated concern and the chilling effect of a restriction regarding access to Research Council funding, and that the 30% cap on Innovate UK funding to public sector organisations, which could include the two catapults or universities working together, was a substantial disadvantage. Her Majesty’s Government recognised and accepted the recommendation.

In November 2021, Innovate UK published its plan of action moving forward, recognising the success of catapults but, as far as I can ascertain, failing to address the question of restrictions to Research Council funding and the quantum of Innovate UK funding for public sector organisations. Are Her Majesty’s Government content that this issue has been addressed and if not, how do they propose to address this pivotal recommendation in the Science and Technology Committee’s report?

It is clear that public sector investment in research and development is frequently attended by a tremendous upside in terms of private sector contribution. We see this in the analysis of the biomedical catalyst fund: some £250 million of funding resulted in £1.3 billion of private sector contribution to research funding, acquisitions and other elements of commercial activity.

If the true opportunity to leverage public sector R&D in the life sciences sector is to be achieved, providing that funding consistently through mechanisms such as the catapults is of tremendous importance and significance, as is Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to ensuring that if our country is unable to participate in Horizon 2020 funding as an associate member, that funding deficit will be matched. Can the Minister update us on the Government’s position regarding Horizon 2020 funding or its future matching, as that too plays a vital role in the UK innovation landscape?

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the Minister for the thoughtful way in which he introduced this Bill. I declare my own interest as chairman of the Office for Strategic Co-ordination of Health Research.

It is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Patel and the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, with his very insightful observations. I echo my noble friend Lord Patel in strongly welcoming the proposition by Her Majesty’s Government to create this new agency. As we have heard, it represents a substantial opportunity to broaden the different streams of funding available to drive our broad national research and development effort.

Our nation is particularly successful at delivering research and development. There are many fine institutions. We can all draw attention to many discoveries that have had a profound impact during decades of state-directed research funding. Those research interventions have been built over time. They have been based on important principles, such as Haldane, and on the principle that Governments can define national priorities and that research effort can be directed to try to answer those priorities. It is right, therefore, that Her Majesty’s Government should decide to establish a new agency with a different and distinctive purpose.

By definition, research is attended by uncertainty. It is part of the scientific method. This is not so much a criticism as a recognition that many of the agencies and structures that we have developed, such as UKRI, the research councils and Innovate UK, are obliged to conduct their approach to making funds available for research to institutions and entities beyond the public sector in a way that is somewhat bureaucratic. There has not been the tolerance for failure. Indeed, if anything exists in our system, it is a deep dissatisfaction with a failure of research. Where projects have failed or where it has been considered that public funds have been used inappropriately, there has always been substantial criticism.

For ARIA to be different, it needs to be released from some of the bureaucratic constraints that attend other funding agencies, if it is to achieve its principal objective of being able to support proposals for research that will be truly transformational and have potentially the greatest impact. Therefore, some of them will be attended with the greatest risk of failure. I fully accept what the Minister said in his opening comments, that it would be completely wrong to create a new agency that is constrained exactly by the constraints that attend our current funding agencies.

In equal measure, however, in creating such an independent agency, predicated on the basis that failure must be accepted, the real challenge is the potential for risk. There are three important questions which I hope that the Minister will be able to answer, not necessarily in this debate, but while the Bill is in Committee

The first is to provide clarity about the relationship between ARIA and current existing agencies such as UKRI, the research councils and Innovate UK, but also more broadly in our research funding eco-systems—the charities and others which might have an interest in some of the areas of research that ARIA decides to support. I know that in the other place Her Majesty’s Government were unable to accept amendments to the Bill attending the question of a formally defined memorandum to describe these relationships, and that is acceptable. However, there needs to be absolute clarity about how these relationships will be defined, and how in practice ARIA will sit alongside these other agencies and ensure that there is not unnecessary duplication and waste in terms of its use of public funds, as we have heard, in comparison to what other agencies may be doing successfully at the moment.

The second is the question of accountability. Clearly, it is essential for any public body to have a form of accountability. The Minister spoke about this, and, indeed, in the Explanatory Notes, there is clarity about ARIA having to lay its accounts before Parliament and being subject to review by the National Audit Office. Indeed, as I understand it, the Secretary of State will have to answer for ARIA in the other place.

However, I have a concern in this regard, and it is slightly counterintuitive. Although we will all be very enthusiastic about the establishment of an agency that will tolerate failure, how confident can we be that our system will actually tolerate that failure? At some moment in time, will that failure become too much to accept? It might be that, in terms of the scientific approach—the project-led approach by those driving the agenda within ARIA—it was perfectly acceptable to take that approach. However, let us say that the broader political system, the commentators and others, will not accept it. There needs to be some protection for ARIA by way of appropriate accountability so that it can defend itself against the kinds of criticisms and attacks that might happen in the future when failure starts to occur. In that way it will not be undermined, and what is an important contribution to the research-funding landscape will not be inadvertently or too soon undermined and destroyed.

The final point is that we need to be clear about where this fundamental research, invention and discovery go in terms of the next stage. We should not, of course, replicate the model of DARPA in the United States; it has a completely different purpose. The purpose of ARIA, quite rightly, will be much more broadly defined. There needs to be some clarity about how government departments and other agencies might participate in taking advantage of the benefit of the product of ARIA to ensure that there is continued funding and support so that that translation and ultimate application is not lost.

Science Research Funding in Universities (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Kakkar (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Patel for his leadership of the Science and Technology Committee, for the thoughtful way in which he led this inquiry into science research funding in our universities and for how he introduced this debate. In so doing, I declare my own interest as professor of surgery at University College London, chairman of UCLPartners, and an active biomedical researcher.

We have heard during the debate that the future funding of the research base in our universities is important not only to the universities themselves, but to our country more generally. It is our ambition that we become an economy driven by technology and innovation, and to be able to deliver that we have to have the appropriate science base in our universities. We have seen in recent months, with the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of the science base to protect our population and drive forward innovation. Life science, as it has been described in this debate and in previous debates in your Lordships’ House, is, after the financial services industry, the second most important part of our economy. It employs directly some 250,000 people, with a further 250,000 jobs dependent on life sciences in our country.

The United Kingdom has been at the forefront of research developments in the Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrating the importance of the availability of an effective and mature research base in our universities to address critical questions at a moment’s notice. This report, as we have heard, was published over a year ago, before the Covid-19 pandemic and its implications for our universities, and, of course, before the withdrawal agreement from the European Union had been concluded —and, indeed, before the current trade negotiations have run their course. The impact of our departure from the European Union and the broader impact on our economy that it will have on our research funding remain most pertinent.

I will focus on two issues. With Brexit, as we have heard during this debate, it is essential that Her Majesty’s Government commit to three principal areas. Yes, of course, one is funding to ensure that the shortfall that will arise as a result of our no longer being able to participate directly in European funding schemes is met by Her Majesty’s Government. However, that funding shortfall must also facilitate collaborative research within the European Union—that is, our own university collaborative participation—as well as collaboration with research networks elsewhere in the world. Of course, we must also do everything to ensure that mobility of researchers is maintained. In this regard, the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, are critical, on ensuring that the visa system facilitates the ability of not only researchers to come to our country, but their families too.

Secondly, on public funding for research, we have heard about the importance of ensuring that QR funding, that second important element of the dual support mechanism, is maintained at levels that guarantee an inflationary increase. We need also to ensure that the shortfall in funding provided by charities to support research in our universities, particularly biomedical research, is addressed. Charities are responsible for some 15% of research funding. As we have heard in this debate, a 1% reduction in support for universities is expected this year.

Artificial Intelligence (Select Committee Report)

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for the thoughtful way in which he introduced this report. I also congratulate the noble Lord and his committee, as it is an excellent report. In so doing, I confine my remarks to Chapter 7, which deals with the potential impact of artificial intelligence on healthcare, and I declare my own interest as professor of surgery at University College London and chairman of UCLPartners.

This excellent report identifies that healthcare and its delivery are particularly sensitive to the tremendous opportunities that the application of artificial intelligence will provide. It also represents all the challenges that the adoption of artificial intelligence will present to society, government, individual professionals and the public more generally.

We have already seen the adoption of artificial intelligence in the application of clinical practice. Two of the most important applications have been in the area of diagnostics. The first regards the interpretation of retinal scans to help diagnose retinal pathology more rapidly. That application, developed at Moorfields Eye Hospital in conjunction with DeepMind, shows particular promise; it allows for broad application across large communities, reducing the time and resources necessary to make appropriate diagnosis of eye pathology and therefore providing the opportunity for earlier intervention and for interfering with the natural history of diseases in the eye to improve clinical outcome. Equally, there have been recent reports of the application of artificial intelligence to the interpretation of lung scans to help the earlier diagnosis of pathology in the lung, particularly pulmonary fibrosis; this is an important condition which, if identified early, allows the opportunity for earlier intervention and therefore, again, “for improving” clinical outcome.

However, these are rather simple applications. As we move forward in our broader development of the life sciences and biomedical sciences, so with reference to the opportunity for genomic medicine—the proper evaluation of the genome under individual disease conditions—combined with better characterisation of the phenotype, better monitoring and characterisation of clinical outcomes and the combination of all those data will provide tremendous opportunities for solutions through artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning, which will transform clinical practice.

This transformation will first come in the area of early and more accurate diagnosis; it will soon be applied to the identification of new targets for the management of diseases, with new therapeutic targets for the development of potential new drug entities. This will be done more efficiently and more rapidly, and, of course, in such a way as to deliver on the promise of personalised medicine—precision medicine—through analysis of the characteristics of an individual disease and how that disease behaves, both in individual patients and among many individual patients. One can then predict how the natural history will progress and therefore how we should intervene more effectively.

All this promise is attended by a number of very serious challenges, as identified in this excellent report. How do Her Majesty’s Government propose to deal with seven particular challenges regarding the application of artificial intelligence in healthcare? Without clarity of purpose and of strategy in addressing these challenges, it will not be possible for our country, uniquely positioned as it is with the National Health Service, to bring the benefits of artificial intelligence and the attendant improvement in the delivery of healthcare and clinical outcomes to our fellow citizens.

The first of those benefits relates to data scientists—invaluable experts in a developing field that brings together mathematics, statistics and computational science. These individuals are at the heart of the development of the algorithms that inform artificial intelligence. How do Her Majesty’s Government propose to ensure that the National Health Service can compete in attracting these vital individuals with this particular skill set whom we do not currently have in sufficient numbers in the NHS so as to provide opportunities for artificial intelligence in healthcare?

Equally, a huge amount of data is generated on a daily basis through routine tests, investigations and the follow-up of patients in all healthcare environments. Those data, although vast in quantity, represent a meaningless resource unless they can be curated appropriately and their quality can be secured. They can then be brought to bear to provide opportunity in artificial intelligence application for the benefit of the individual patient. How do Her Majesty’s Government propose to ensure the curation of high-quality data across the widely varying range of institutions and environments where NHS care is delivered to ensure that the value of those data, both for the individual and for society more generally, can be secured?

In that regard, there will also be a need to train current and future healthcare professionals so that they will be able to take advantage of the opportunities that artificial intelligence as applied to healthcare will provide. What moves have Her Majesty’s Government made with regard to, for instance, Health Education England to ensure that curricula are now being developed to ensure both lifetime learning for current professionals and the development of future healthcare professionals so that they can take advantage of the opportunities that are provided? All this will of course require substantial funding. Her Majesty’s Government have committed substantially to increase the NHS budget between now and 2022, but what proportion of that additional funding will be applied specifically to data in the NHS and to the opportunity to adopt innovations associated with artificial intelligence at scale and pace across the entire health economy?

There are then questions relating to the adoption and application of artificial intelligence that attend to other areas, establishing both the social licence that will give the public and patients confidence in the state collecting and keeping secure very sensitive data—far beyond the data that we currently collect, moving to genetic information and beyond—and social licence regarding the sharing of those data, frequently with commercial third parties which have the expertise and experience to exploit them appropriately to provide opportunities to improve healthcare outcomes.

Ethical and legal questions will also need to be answered when clinicians start to rely increasingly on information generated as a result of artificial intelligence applications in making clinical decisions and driving forward patient care. How is that ethical framework to be delivered? How are legal questions around liability to be addressed when decisions are taken on the basis of AI applications for individual patients? Then there are important questions about how NHS institutions will be supported in negotiating access to data both for research and for the development of patient applications. Some institutions are well positioned to do that; others are not. How will Her Majesty’s Government ensure that all that is brought together so that the important opportunities provided by artificial intelligence application for the delivery of healthcare in the NHS can be taken for the benefit of all our fellow citizens?

Industrial Strategy

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the thoughtful way in which he introduced the debate and Her Majesty’s Government’s industrial strategy. I remind noble Lords of my interests as professor of surgery at University College London, chair of University College London Partners, business ambassador for healthcare and life sciences, and a member of your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee, which is undertaking an inquiry on the life sciences industrial strategy.

It is quite right that there is a very acute focus on the question of life sciences, because they have played, and will continue to play in future, a vital role for our country and its economy. After financial services, the life sciences sector is one of the most important, and it is built on a substantial and impressive ecosystem that has been developed over many decades. We have four of the top 10 biomedical universities in the world; the published output from the research activity in those universities accounts annually for some 10% of citations globally and some 15% of the most highly cited papers published. Much of that research is undertaken with impressive collaboration with institutions in the United States, the European Union and the rest of the world.

We have two of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies based here in the United Kingdom. They represent a vital part of our economy, providing some £21 billion a year in exports. Consistently over the last 15 years, every year, they have contributed more than £1 billion in surpluses to the economy. The impressive large pharma sector is supported by more than 3,500 small and medium-sized enterprises in the medtech and biotech spheres; of those 3,500 companies, some 500 are actively exporting. They have seen substantial growth in the period 2009-14. For the medtech sector it is a 5.8% growth in revenue per annum; in the biotechnology sector it is 4% per annum in that period.

All that demonstrates that we have a fundamental and strong base but, in addition, we have something quite unique—the National Health Service, which provides care free at the point of delivery to all our citizens, and a wide range of care, and which has provided a unique opportunity over many decades to develop the base for our medical research, which in many areas leads the world.

What is striking is how the opportunities and the needs will grow, needs that will have to be addressed by the life sciences sector. The global value of the life sciences industries is some $1.6 trillion; by 2023, that will grow to over $2 trillion. With regard to healthcare expenditure and revenue, in the period between 2014 and 2027 it is estimated that expenditure on healthcare globally will grow by 5.8% per annum, but in certain markets, where we already have a very strong relationship and affinity, it will grow at an even greater rate—in India by some 15% per annum over that period, in China by 12% and in the Middle East and the Gulf by 8% per annum. So there are very big opportunities for the life sciences industrial base to make important contributions to our own economy. At the moment, some 300,000 people are employed in the science and technology sectors, in highly skilled jobs. The potential for that to grow over time to provide economic benefit and employment is quite obvious.

It is for that reason that there is so much focus on the life sciences strategy authored by Sir John Bell and presented along with its first set of sector deals before the Christmas Recess. In that strategy there is a focus on five important areas: to ensure that the science base in our country, to drive the innovation and discovery essential for life sciences, is properly invested in and maintained, not only in the public sector but through private sector investment through the sector deals; to ensure that the innovative companies that result from that discovery can grow in our country; and to ensure that the patient capital essential to allow them to grow over time to become substantial entities is provided in our own country, rather than those small enterprises having to look abroad and, potentially, move abroad, when they require greater investment. We need to provide the opportunity for an appropriate manufacturing base, with the skills required for those highly innovative industries to prosper and succeed in our country.

There are two elements that are vitally dependent on the National Health Service. The first is the adoption of these innovations at scale and pace within the NHS. This is critically important for a number of reasons. First, the delivery of healthcare in our country is not going to be sustainable unless we are able not only to adopt innovation to make the delivery of healthcare more effective in improving clinical outcomes but to use in the most efficient fashion the vital and valuable resource that the state makes available for the delivery of healthcare, providing true value for each of the health economies and institutions where that delivery takes place. Secondly, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, there is the need to harness the ability to use the unique data generated in the National Health Service through the care of countless millions of patients, day after day, month after month and year after year. This longitudinal database is unique in the delivery of healthcare anywhere in the world. It can inform research, development and innovation to develop new therapies and technologies and improve the way that we deliver care. All this has huge value in improving the health of our nation and in providing a remarkable opportunity to generate wealth. As the House has already heard, using the technologies that we develop, and the companies that have developed as a result of them, to export globally will transform healthcare throughout the world and, therefore, also ensure and enhance the standing of our country as a leader in healthcare and life sciences.

The life sciences industrial strategy makes a number of important proposals. One is the health advanced research programme, developed to mirror the very impressive programme established some decades ago by the Department of Defense in the United States to ensure that high-risk proposals—the so-called moonshot strategies—can be properly invested, developing transformational technologies and innovations that will have a profound impact, in this case on human health. It has worked so well in the area of defence in the United States because that department has such a huge expenditure budget. This brings me to the question of the vital role that the life sciences strategy envisages for the National Health Service. It must be able to adopt innovation at scale and pace and to provide confidence to those who are going to invest in high-risk strategies that if they are successful there is the opportunity for the home market—the remarkable National Health Service—to adopt those innovations for the benefit of patients and our fellow citizens.

In this regard, there is some concern. The strategy is excellent, but it is unclear how the Government are going to secure the role that the NHS must play in ensuring that the life sciences strategy can be a success. I have three questions for the Minister. First, how do the Government envisage securing the critical role which the National Health Service must play in the broader life sciences industrial strategy? How will funding be made available to ensure the adoption of innovation at a local level, which is vitally important to support the industries that are envisaged as part of the life sciences strategy? How can the Government aid in transforming the culture in the National Health Service, to ensure that what needs to be done by way of adoption of innovation, beyond its funding, will be practicable and possible in terms of developing the remarkable staff who work in the service, ensuring they have the skills to interact with the innovations that are going to be available and overcoming the culture which is sometimes resistant to adopting innovation?

Finally, how will they ensure that lessons are learned from previous attempts at a life sciences strategy? Will the important lessons from the 2011 announcement of a life sciences strategy by the Prime Minister of the time and the subsequent innovation, health and wealth strategy, announced by Sir David Nicholson when he was leading the NHS, be properly adopted to ensure the success of this strategy?

Queen’s Speech

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Monday 26th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, it is a very great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, and to be the first in your Lordships’ House to be able to congratulate him on his magnificent maiden speech, so clearly informed by the wisdom, experience and insight he has developed through his distinguished career in the City, which culminated, as we have heard, in serving as the 688th Lord Mayor of the City of London. I had the opportunity to speak to the Lord Chief Justice this morning, who indicated to me that the noble Lord was a most successful Lord Mayor of the City of London. He is highly regarded throughout the City and beyond, and your Lordships’ House will benefit from his future contributions to the important work that we have the responsibility of discharging on behalf of our nation.

I also congratulate the Minister on the thoughtful way in which he introduced this debate and declare my interests as professor of surgery at University College London, chairman of UCLPartners and UK business ambassador for healthcare and life sciences. I shall concentrate my contribution in this debate on the area of life sciences.

We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, that financial services represent the most important part of our economy, but beyond financial services the life sciences are the second. They are an industry and a sector predicated on the development over many decades of a very finely balanced ecosystem. At the heart of that ecosystem is the National Health Service. Four of the 10 leading universities of the world, three of the 10 universities leading specifically in the field of life sciences, and two of the top 10 pharma companies in the world are based here in the United Kingdom, between them employing some 200,000 people in more than 180 countries around the world and providing a surplus in excess of £20 billion a year to the UK economy. There are some 1,300 companies in our country manufacturing in the medical area. There are 3,500 small and medium-sized enterprises, 500 of which are exporting actively, and the life sciences industries employ some 235,000 people, which is just under 1% of total private sector employment in our country. Those are important statistics, because the life sciences sector not only makes an important contribution to the economy and to generating wealth but has the vital purpose of ensuring that we can improve healthcare and the outcomes we can achieve for our patients through the application of innovation and technology that has transformed life prospects over recent decades.

A recent UK Trade & Investment report, Strength and Opportunity in 2014, which looked at the life sciences sector in 2014, established that it was a true world leader. Since 2011, the sector has attracted some £7.5 billion of inward investment into our country, which has resulted in the creation of some 18,000 jobs. The medtech sector grew at some 5.8% per annum in the period 2009 to 2014, and the biotech sector some 4% per annum. Those are very impressive figures when one looks at the general pace of economic activity during that period, and something that cannot be neglected.

The Conservative Party manifesto at the last election committed to ensuring that the United Kingdom was the most innovative country in the world. Clearly, the gracious Speech has identified certain areas of innovation—we heard in the Minister’s introductory comments a particular focus on driverless cars and travel into space—but I hope that the Minister can confirm a continued emphasis on the area of life sciences. This important area of activity, which is so bound up with the public sector, our universities and the delivery of healthcare, will not thrive unless there continues to be a determined focus on ensuring that it can compete globally. It is a sector, beyond many others. that is exquisitely dependent on collaboration—across universities, across industries and between Governments. Any loss of focus in that area will result in our country paying a heavy price.

In that regard, would the Minister be able to address two or three questions? First, is he content that there will be the opportunity for sufficient focus on the life sciences sector so that it can continue to deliver as required without any further legislation to deal with some anomalies with regard to the environment in which it has to operate? In particular, is he content that UK Research and Innovation will be able to drive the kind of collaborations and co-operation among scientists and innovators, not only in our own country but across the European Union, and potentially in other fundamentally innovative economies such as the United States and the emerging innovative economies in the east, such as China and India?

Is the Minister content that the vital role that the National Health Service has to play with regard to innovation in the life sciences sector can be delivered, particularly with the adoption of innovation at scale and pace—innovation established in our own country and applied for the benefit of the patients in our National Health Service but also using the fundamental opportunities of the NHS to demonstrate to the rest of the world the value of what we can bring to drive improvements in global healthcare?

Finally, is the Minister content that the life sciences sector can be properly supported in the negotiations attending our exit from the European Union?

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, I have been listening to him—

Brexit: Medical Research and Innovation

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I entirely agree with my noble friend. The fund for backing priority technologies, which we have announced today, will further support the UK’s potential to turn strengths in research into a global, industrial and commercial lead.

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as professor of surgery at University College London and business ambassador for healthcare and life sciences. The announcement of £2 billion a year of additional funding to support research and development is most welcome, but are Her Majesty’s Government able to confirm that that funding, in addition to driving an industrial strategy in this area, will be delivered through the activities of the research councils, secure excellence in terms of the purpose of research funding, and be used to ensure the ongoing participation of our great institutions in global collaborative networks, which are vital for the delivery of excellent science?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord on the excellence of our research and development base, and on the great work being done by the research councils. I look forward to debating the way forward when the Bill on education and research reaches this House in the coming weeks. New funding has been made available today. This vision and direction of travel is excellent news for our science and research base in every part of the country.