Israel: Trade

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, compared with some of the big debates facing us around phase 2 of the Middle East peace process, the urgent need to get reconstruction going in Gaza, and the Iranian people’s uprising against their theocracy, debates on trade can sometimes seem rather esoteric, although they are clearly important in terms of jobs and living standards. But I want to make very tangible—picking up some of the points of the noble Lord, Lord Austin—the importance of the bilateral relationship for health and life sciences.

The reason that is so tangible is that today, like every day of the year, millions of our fellow citizens—millions of NHS patients—will have taken a tablet supplied to them by an Israeli pharmaceutical company for a huge range of conditions, spanning multiple sclerosis, cancer, pain management and antibiotics. Millions of patients benefit and, frankly, the NHS saves billions of pounds as a consequence. One estimate put before the Commons science committee just before Christmas suggested that we gain about £2.4 billion of savings each year as a consequence particularly of that trade relationship we have, buying those medicines from a leading Israeli company, which turns out therefore to be a top-15 strategic supplier to the NHS.

There is another reason why it makes sense to have some geographical diversity in our medicine supply chain: it is no secret that at the time of the Covid pandemic, for example, we saw some questionable behaviour on the part of the European Commission seeking to restrict flows of vaccines and medicines. It is also no secret that the current US Administration has been putting significant pressure on the British Government to hike the drug prices that the NHS is paying. So having a range of other suppliers geographically around the world strengthens our resilience and our negotiating hand.

It is not just about medicines, of course, but also medtech, for the reasons we have heard. The Government’s 10-year health plan talks about the transition from analogue to digital. Frankly, the epicentre of where that innovation is fizzing away is not just in the US; it is also in a lot of the companies that the noble Lord, Lord Austin, referred to.

One point for the Minister would be that we had in 2023 the memorandum of understanding that set out the importance of these kinds of bilateral relationships in something called the 2030 road map. It would be very useful to hear where that has now got to in the context of the Government’s current trade policy with Israel. Again, if that could be spelled out and shared with us more clearly, it would also be of great interest to many of the British life sciences companies that supply their own medicines across the world, including to the Middle East and Israel. I am thinking of companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, for which this is hugely important. Of course, they are able to be successful because of the innovative science that happens not just in each of our countries but around the world. No country has a monopoly on science.

When the world’s most prominent scientific journal was publishing its year-end assessment of 10 of the breakthrough science discoveries in the last year, it referred to one of them at the Weizmann Institute. Unfortunately, the lab that had produced that discovery was then hit by an Iranian missile in the summer. But the conclusion that Nature magazine drew from those 10 discoveries, including that one of the Weizmann, is that they

“showcase the ongoing strength of science globally: its ability to transcend national borders … its power to save and improve lives … They also serve as a reminder of what is lost when governments … fail to nurture the international collaborative spirit that creates the breakthroughs that make the world a better place for all”.

Let us ourselves not make that mistake.