Mesothelioma Bill [HL]

Lord Walton of Detchant Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, in moving Amendments 2, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24, I join other noble Lords who have expressed their thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Freud, the Minister, for doing an incredibly tough job over the last year or so. It has been very well done. I am very grateful for his remarks earlier.

The Minister said that if the Bill were delayed—none of us intended to do that—it could cause further problems in due course. Nevertheless, I just hope he accepts that that is no reason for curtailing due parliamentary process in any way. Of course, it is up to the Government to decide what to do in another place. If your Lordships decide to include amendments to the Bill here, it will not be Members of another place who precipitate the ping-pong; it will be the Government.

With those words, I refer the noble Lord to the all-party support for this group of amendments, and to the letter that was sent to him and other Members of your Lordships’ House, signed by some 22 Members. They include some of the leading authorities on medical research and the law and others with first-hand knowledge of a fatal disease that claims 2,400 lives annually and is predicted to kill a further 56,000 British citizens between 2014 and 2044. Dr Mick Peake, the clinical lead at the National Cancer Intelligence Network, is right when he says, “We must make every effort not to miss this opportunity to lead the world in this area and to finally make significant inroads into this dreadful disease for patients and their families”.

The amendments before your Lordships seek to impose a levy of no more than 1% to raise funds to support research into the causes and treatment of mesothelioma, and have the wholehearted support of the British Lung Foundation. I thank it, and especially my noble friends Lord Walton of Detchant and Lord Pannick, and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, who are co-sponsors of the amendments, and noble Lords who spoke in Committee and who through constraints of time might be unable to do so again today.

At the conclusion of Committee, it was the Minister who encouragingly said:

“Well, my Lords, I feel like adding my name to the amendment”.

As recently as Monday, I met the Minister again—once again, I am grateful to him and his team of officials for the time and courtesy they have unfailingly given—to see whether we could find a way for him to translate that desire into a reality. I have offered to withdraw this amendment if the Government undertake to introduce their own at Third Reading, or indeed in the other place, and that offer still stands. Although I feel that the noble Lord has been a victim of the Whitehall curse, I want to put on the record that he has been deeply committed to ensuring more support for research. However, as he told us in Committee:

“I have hit a brick wall at every turn”.

It is Parliament’s job to demolish such brick walls.

Although new figures published yesterday show that the MRC has made a helpful increase in funding for mesothelioma research, the sums are still very modest and should be seen in the context of years and years of virtually no state funding. When viewed alongside the two cancers of closest mortality in the UK—myeloma and melanoma—the funds for mesothelioma still lag considerably behind. Unlike many other forms of cancer, rates of mesothelioma are still rising. The United Kingdom already has the highest mesothelioma mortality rates in the entire world, yet there is little by way of effective treatments and at present no chance of a cure.

This shocking situation was underlined by the Minister himself, who candidly told us in Committee:

“Something very odd is happening here when so little money has gone into research in this area”.

In Committee he agreed that,

“There needs to be a kick-start process to get research going”.—[Official Report, 5/6/13; col. GC250.]

That is precisely what this amendment does. It is a kick-start.

In a letter sent by his department to all Members of your Lordships’ House on Monday, the Minister reiterated his support for increased support for research, but said that, “unfortunately, the mechanism proposed is just not viable”.

With the assistance of the British Lung Foundation, I took the precaution of asking Daniel Greenberg QC to draft this amendment with me. I did so not simply because he is the editor of Craies on Legislation, Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary, Jowitt’s Dictionary of English Law, Westlaw UK Annotated Statutes and editor-in-chief of the Statute Law Review, but perhaps most importantly because he was parliamentary counsel from 1991 to 2010. Clearly, he knows a thing or two about drafting legislation, and presumably the Government would not cast doubt on the viability of the reams of legislation that he drafted for them.

The Minister will forgive me but in the nearly 35 years since I entered Parliament, I have heard the phrases “not viable” or “technically defective” as the refuge of last resort whenever we run out of good arguments. If the argument for a levy lacked viability, it would cast doubt on the whole principle that underpins this Bill, which is based on the imposition of a levy.

The Minister will recall that before Committee he was briefed to oppose the amendment on the grounds that there was no precedent for hypothecation and to raise that other old bogey of “legal obstacles”, the Human Rights Act. To answer those objections, noble Lords gave the noble Lord the precedent of Section 123 of the Gambling Act 2005, Sections 24 and 27 of the Betting, Gaming and Lotteries Act 1963, the HGV Road User Levy Act 2013, and other industry levies, including the fossil fuel levy, the levy on the pig industry to eradicate Aujeszky’s disease and the Gas Levy Act 1981. As my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss and my noble friend Lord Pannick made abundantly clear, the idea that such a levy was an infringement on the Human Rights Act is, frankly, risible. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Pannick said:

“It would be quite fanciful to suggest that there is a legal reason not to support an amendment”.—[Official Report, 5/6/13; col. GC 247.]

None of those shadow-boxing parliamentary arguments will do. They are simply not worthy of an issue that has lethal consequences for so many of our countrymen. Why has mesothelioma research had this Cinderella status? Why does it require Parliament to put it right? Why has it for so many years received little or no state funding? In Committee, the Minister provided clues. He said that mesothelioma,

“was an unfashionable area to go into and therefore the people who wanted to make their careers in research turned to other cancers. As a result, good-quality research proposals were not coming in and therefore the research council did not feel that it could supply funds. That is the reason and it has been the reason for decades”.—[Official Report, 5/6/13; col. GC 253.]

The advisers to the Minister at the DWP have written that there is no lack of necessary skills for research into asbestos-related diseases but that there are perverse incentives to tackle what are perceived as more tractable research questions or tumour types that are considered easier to study and, where possible, to build on past progress. They said that research bids that were seen as likely to fail were not being presented. Therefore, it is not a lack of capacity in the field that is the problem; as my noble friend Lord Kakkar outlined in Committee, many eminent researchers are interested in mesothelioma research. High-quality bids have been in short supply in the past decade precisely because leading academics knew that it was pointless putting time and effort into preparing a bid that was unlikely to succeed.

Dr Robert Rintoul, consultant respiratory physician at Papworth Hospital and chief investigator of the recently launched mesothelioma tissue bank, told me that if more funding is made available, big labs will suddenly get interested in mesothelioma, which will increase the quality of research grants. Dr John Maher, honorary consultant immunologist at King’s College Hospital, said, “As I write, we have a clinical-grade viral vector ready for use, an optimised and patentable manufacturing process and a recently licensed GNP manufacturing facility available to generate cell products. However, there are no realistic prospects of obtaining funds to undertake such work in mesothelioma in the near future”. There clearly is no question that further investment in mesothelioma research is urgently required.

We have heard from the Minister that this will peak in two years’ time, but listen to this stark warning from Dr Stefan Marciniak, the honorary consultant physician at Cambridge University’s Institute for Medical Research, who told me that there will be a continued increase in cases worldwide well into this century owing to the ever-increasing use of asbestos in the BRIC countries, and that carbon nanotubes share frightening similarities with asbestos-like minerals and could lead to a second wave of mesothelioma. That is why we need urgent research

I am delighted to see the Minister and his noble friend Lord Howe on the Front Bench today. The Minister will be sponsoring a reception later this month on mesothelioma research for an invited audience of some 40 people. I know that he will agree that such meetings, welcome though they are, are not enough and certainly not a substitute for statutory obligations. By themselves, such initiatives are unlikely to lead to the sea change in investment that is needed to ensure that the recent advances in mesothelioma research are sustained. If we do not seize this legislative moment, all the talk will vanish into the ether. It will be the informal approach that lacks viability, not this amendment.

As my noble friend Lord Walton of Detchant suggested in Committee, the amendment proposes that the funds be administered by a competent third party, which would have no difficulty in investing in all the different types of research that are so urgently required. We need both a statutory levy on the insurance firms and a greater effort from our public research institutions in dealing with a disease that will kill more than 2,000 people every year in the United Kingdom. It is vital that we as legislators grapple with the source of so much misery and suffering, which is the reason, after all, for the millions of pounds of compensation payments for which the Bill provides.

The amendment proposes a commendably simple approach and, crucially, has not been opposed by the insurance industry, whose representatives I met last week. No letter has been received by Members of your Lordships’ House from the industry opposing this very modest amendment.

Having listened to suggestions made in Committee by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and others, we explicitly provide in the amendment for the scheme—a levy of no more than 1%—to be proportionate. The supplement reflects insurers’ market share, as the main levy contained in the Bill already does.

In the face of a vicious disease that according to the Government’s figures will claim the lives of some 56,000 more British citizens and the lethal nature of which we have known about since the Merewether report of 1930, it would be nothing short of a national scandal if we did not seize this rare legislative chance to offer those who have faced the blight of this horrific disease something better than what has gone before. I beg to move.

[Lord Walton of Detchant]

My Lords, I have been pleased to add my name to this amendment, so forcefully and ably proposed by my noble friend Lord Alton. This is an appalling and tragic disease. Although my specialty was never respiratory medicine, in the course of my professional career I saw many people suffering from mesothelioma and recognised to the full its utterly devastating effects. Indeed, one such person was a professional colleague of mine who was a consultant neurologist. One of the disease’s most unfortunate features is that, after exposure to asbestos, particularly blue asbestos, the incubation period is extraordinarily long. People sometimes do not develop the disease for many years after exposure. Indeed, I recently learnt of an 87 year-old man who had developed mesothelioma for the first time, having worked at the age of 40 as carpenter cutting up sheets of asbestos. That is one of its appalling features, and its effects are utterly distressing. It is not a localised cancer that grows in a single location where a surgeon can remove it; it is a diffuse involvement of cancerous tissue that grows over the surface of the lung, between the lung and the chest wall. It gradually begins to strangulate the lung and eventually causes respiratory failure. It is a devastating disease—I need say no more.

However, as my noble friend has said, research on this topic is extraordinarily limited. I speak as someone who had 14 years’ involvement with the Medical Research Council, ending up as a member of the council for four years. At that time, we received research grant applications from a huge number of notable doctors and scientists seeking to research particular conditions.

The MRC, as part of its policy, used to identify priority areas which it saw as requiring further research effort, but it did not identify single diseases such as mesothelioma. It talked about problems of mental health, and about problems of ageing. Even the notable Cancer Research UK campaign, which has been a massive contributor to research in cancer in the broadest sense, has not identified single-disease conditions as having a particularly high priority in its programmes.

It is interesting that the British Lung Foundation and four leading insurance firms three years ago reached an agreement under which they collectively granted £1 million a year for three years to invest predominantly in mesothelioma research. The results were impressive. New researchers from other fields who had never thought of working on mesothelioma started to take an interest. This led to the creation of Europe’s first mesothelioma tissue bank, storing biological tissue and funding work to identify the genetic architecture of the disease.

My experience as a doctor, having been involved with a huge number of different charities funding research over the years, is that the existence of charities that are established to support research on single diseases has been immensely valuable and important in attracting new scientists into the field for which they have provided funds. One has to think only of the British Heart Foundation, which has given a massive impetus to work on heart disease. Without the money which the Multiple Sclerosis Society has collected over all the years, we would never have had the same effect.

In my research field of neuromuscular disease, had it not been for the work of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign there is little doubt that we would not have reached the stage that we now have, where research on exon skipping has led to the introduction of a drug for the treatment of the most severe form of the disease. Those are massive developments, but they came about because funds had been raised by individual charities and groups specifically for research in that disease.

As my noble friend said, until this recent initiative by the British Lung Foundation, the funding for research on mesothelioma had been miniscule. Unfortunately, the funding by the BLF and others has now run out. The sole purpose of the amendment is to persuade the Government to accept that a tiny percentage of the levy which they already lay on insurance companies for the support of patients with this condition and their families should be specifically devoted to research. That could make a massive contribution to the future of patients with mesothelioma and to the development of an effective treatment in the foreseeable future.

The Government cannot protest on the grounds of hypothecation, because the levy under Clause 13 is already hypothecated. They cannot just say that people working on mesothelioma can apply to the Medical Research Council. Of course they can, but the crucial point about the levy is that it would provide funds that will attract scientists to work on that highly intractable problem. The fact that it is intractable is not an excuse. It deserves more attention, it deserves funding, and this group of amendments is one way to make certain that that funding will be made available and that scientists will be attracted to work in this field.

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[Earl Howe]

I think that there is scope for that, whether it is a stand-alone report or is built automatically into the report that is produced by the department or the MRC. I would be happy to take that idea forward.

[Lord Walton of Detchant]

Before the Minister sits down and before my noble friend responds, perhaps I may ask the Minister this question. Let us suppose that, in the light of the developments and proposals that he has outlined, the insurance industry—the ABI—decides, in the goodness of its heart and bearing in mind the importance of this problem, that it wishes to make an ongoing and regular contribution to research in this field. Would the National Institute for Health Research be precluded from accepting non-government funds or would such funding have to be channelled, for example, through the cancer research campaign?

[Earl Howe]

A very great deal of the research conducted in this country is funded by different sources. It is funded by the Government, charities, universities, and industry. Nothing in the arrangements that I have outlined precludes a joint arrangement for funding mesothelioma research, which is why I welcomed the indication that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, gave about the ABI and the possibility of augmenting whatever funds are forthcoming from the MRC or the NIHR. That is an important point to make. I think I have said enough. The ball is in the noble Lord’s court.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, this is not about throwing money at problems. That is certainly something that I have always eschewed throughout the whole of my time in politics. You have to demonstrate the case and there is a case here. If 56,000 of our countrymen are going to die of this disease over the next 30 years or so, we have to find adequate resources to tackle mesothelioma. That is not being done by this Bill. We have a rare opportunity to do something about it.

[Lord Walton of Detchant]

Before my noble friend sits down and eventually decides what action he proposes to take, I wish to ask him whether he feels that the important developments referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, relating to forthcoming meetings between the Medical Research Council, the NIHR and other organisations, might not—at the moment—be a useful way forward?

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

I am grateful to my noble friend and yes, of course I am delighted that those meetings are going to happen. The noble Earl was kind enough to say that perhaps the debates that have been precipitated on this issue in Committee, at Second Reading and again today have helped to bring that about. However, the moment will pass and all of us who sit in this House know that once the legislative vehicle has moved on, the opportunity to make something happen disappears into the ether. That is why I intend to press this to a vote and to test the will of your Lordships’ House.