Care Bill [HL]

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I entered the Chamber expecting to speak not to this amendment but, as the Minister may recognise, on the issue of human fertilisation. However, I am feeling drawn into the argument. I find it difficult to agree with my noble friends on this side of the House. The wording of the amendment would not really fulfil the laudable purpose set out by my noble friends. There are many examples where this information would be very important. The case of Seroxat is a fine example of where there was a real need to have better regulation of the negative results of a drug trial.

There are many examples where the negative effects of a drug trial may not be of relevance in the same sort of way. In the area of reproductive medicine, for example, clomiphene citrate was first given as a contraceptive. The surprise was that people got pregnant on it, so the drug was shelved as a contraceptive. A great deal later, however, a drug company suddenly recognised that it had something that might stimulate pregnancy in women who had been infertile. The problem is that a drug company sponsors, pays for and organises research, so to some extent it has a commercial value in that research. We have to strike a very careful balance between when there is an important commercial angle which requires proper legislation and, equally, when there is a chance for drug companies to do a good job—as they did eventually with clomiphene citrate when it was launched as one of the most successful drugs in my area of medicine.

With all due respect to my noble friend Lord Warner, that makes the wording of this amendment difficult. I do not think that frank and fair reporting of a drug trial would be sufficient to meet the needs of what he is arguing in this case.

[Lord Warner]

Perhaps I may respond to my noble friend. I was arguing the case on behalf of the Joint Committee as much as anything else. The committee heard a lot of evidence on this, and across the parties, and across the Commons and the Lords, the conclusions were drawn up in its report to the Government.

I say to my noble friend that most of these clinical trials look at a product which is being tried for a particular purpose. If that product happens to fulfil some other purpose, a different set of issues arises. Seroxat was actually trialled as an anti-depressant, but it failed that test in so far as it was applied in a dangerous way to juveniles. The information about it failing that test was concealed from the public and the regulator. My wording might not be perfect but I am not arguing for my wording. I am trying to get the Government to engage with the issue so that they can find a wording that meets my concerns—and, I suspect, those of my noble friend Lord Turnberg—in the way that the Joint Committee proposed, to engage the HRA in ensuring proper transparency when there are downsides to research. That is in no way stopping a pharmaceutical company from using a drug or trialling a drug for a different set of purposes from that for which it was originally constructed.

Homeopathy

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, we have been consistently clear that no treatments should be arbitrarily rationed on cost grounds. The NHS constitution sets out that patients have a right to expect local decisions on the funding of drugs and treatments to be made rationally following a proper consideration of the evidence. More importantly in this context, it is the responsibility of the NHS to make decisions about commissioning and funding of healthcare treatments and not for Ministers to second-guess that process.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, perhaps I may be permitted to help the Minister. Many years ago, there was a very interesting study in Wales of a placebo-controlled trial that showed that, whatever was given, the best chance of a treatment working, placebo or not, was whether the doctor who was giving the medicine actually believed in it. Does the same apply for homeopathy and the Secretary of State?

NHS: Private Companies

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Winston]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have plans to exempt private companies providing services to the NHS from corporation tax.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)]

My Lords, the Government will not be exempting private sector providers of NHS services from corporation tax. The purpose of Monitor’s fair playing-field review is to ensure that any providers, be they NHS, for-profit, community or voluntary sector organisations, that are able to improve the services offered to patients are given a fair opportunity to do so.

[Lord Winston]

I am grateful to the noble Earl for that reply and deeply reassured that corporation tax will not be in the equation. Given that the NHS is not good at costing out its treatments, how can he be sure that the private sector will not charge what it thinks the market will bear rather than the actual cost of the treatment it is delivering?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the Government’s policy is that competition should never be deployed for competition’s sake but only in the interests of patients. Furthermore, competition should be on the basis of quality and not price. The answer to the noble Lord’s question is that we need to arrive progressively at a system of tariffs that fairly reflect the value and cost of the work that providers do, and that all providers should compete equally on that basis.

Health: Medical Innovation

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, it is both a responsibility and a privilege to be the first speaker after the deeply moving speech from the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi. He carries the respect of the whole House for tabling this debate and has our thanks for the way that he phrased what he said. I feel that my own contribution will be paltry by comparison, but I thought that it would be interesting to look quickly at my own career and think of seven points in it where innovation was an issue. Our excellent Minister sitting on the Front Bench cannot be expected to be responsible for trying to improve innovation in the health service. This is a colossally difficult issue; I will explain why I think so.

The first thing I want to refer to briefly is my involvement in the early days of microsurgery of the fallopian tube. First, that project, which led to about 50 publications, would not have been possible today because the Medical Research Council grant that I got would not be awarded with the current competition. Secondly, it is fair to say that I would not have got an animal licence to practise a surgical procedure, rather than to do it experimentally. There is a neat difference now in how the regulation is. Throughout, there are at least eight issues that conflict to make innovation difficult. One is regulation; one is infrastructure; one is governance; one is industry and its involvement; one is the internal market, supported by both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party; one is clinical training; another is teamwork. Lastly and most importantly, there is the cultural environment. I will come to one other issue at the end, if I may.

The infrastructure for my work with the fallopian tube would not be possible now because I had access then to a workshop in a district general hospital, where Dennis Melrose was producing extracorporeal circulation pumps to improve heart surgery. That is almost unthinkable now. One of the greatest difficulties I had was in getting industrial support for making the microsurgical needles. I could not find a single industry in this country that would make the needles. We made needles with our own hands, under a microscope, that were so fine and delicate that they did not fall to the ground. Unlike the noble Lord’s papers, they actually floated on the air. Eventually, we found a German company which then captured one-third of the world’s ophthalmic market with those needles. There is a message in that innovation.

With regard to trying to translate that surgery into the female pelvis, the big problem now would be governance. What also followed was the issue of having training in teamwork around, to persuade surgeons to work as a team. That has become more difficult now because of the internal market. It is very difficult to prove that a surgical procedure works and is innovative, because it is more difficult to collect the cases together within a health service structure. We have all faced this difficulty for quite a long time. It is not the responsibility of any one Government.

The same thing applies, to some extent, to laparoscopic surgery. I think I was one of the first people to operate using a laparoscope in this country. There would now be a problem with governance; it would be considered risky and unwise, and would take much longer to innovate.

With the present regulatory system, it would also be impossible to see in vitro fertilisation—your Lordships probably know that I have certainly more than dabbled in that—on the books in the way that it is now. It would be very difficult to transfer an egg that you fertilise outside the body into a human patient. It would certainly take much longer to get permission to do that. That is one of the issues. In my own unit, we made a whole series of improvements. We improved the culture media. We demonstrated, for example, the given knowledge that glucose in the medium was poisonous to human embryos but not to any other animal that was experimented on. We could not change those media now, given the current regulatory framework. Even the little changes that one could make—the fact that tungsten light is dangerous to embryos, for example—become increasingly difficult.

I could go on and on but I do not want to spend more than a few minutes and my time is almost up. It would now take much longer to get permission for things such as embryonic detection of genetic defects. I have to declare an interest as somebody who launched a biotech company. One of the problems with that company, which might change the whole field of transplantation with the use of pigs’ kidneys, hearts and livers, and possibly pigs’ lungs, is that it took us more than a year and a quarter to get an animal licence to practise and do the work on just six pigs. It was quite difficult to get the rodent licence before that as well.

I want to say one final thing. The first experiment I ever did was as a result of fraud in my unit. I was asked to go in and troubleshoot by repeating an experiment. It was pure serendipity that we found that there was probably something wrong, with an infection in the vagina of women that might lead to the possibility of a virus being involved. We now know, of course, that the virus is very well established but I did not know what it was at the time. That was a long time ago but one of the issues with true innovation is that serendipity is extremely important. What we can perhaps best all do together is to see how we might improve the culture in which we do our medicine.

NHS: Reconfiguration of Services

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I am grateful to my noble friend and I can give the confirmation that he seeks. Monitor’s advice was sought and obtained by the OFT. He is quite right that that it is one of the benefits from the Health and Social Care Act. In situations of this kind we expect Monitor and the NHS Commissioning Board to engage with the Competition Commission on FT mergers but before that with the OFT because Monitor, as a health-specific regulator, has the insight into the considerations that bear most closely on the interests of patients.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, does the noble Earl agree that, whatever the explanation, the involvement of the OFT suggests an increasing privatisation of the health service? Given that the health service so often does not cost out individual treatments per patient very successfully, that raises the issue of competition between private providers in such areas as this. Would the noble Earl be kind enough to comment on that?

[Earl Howe]

I do not agree with the noble Lord. Competition issues arise within the health service and the matter in the noble Lord’s Question is specifically a health service issue. There are, of course, competition issues involving the independent sector and the charitable sector as well but that is not the focus here. It was the previous Government who recognised the benefits of competition for patients. Our attitude to it is very pragmatic. The key objective for commissioners is to ensure that patients receive the best possible services irrespective of whether they are from the public, voluntary or private sectors. It is for commissioners working with patients to decide where competition is appropriate. It is a means rather than an end in itself.

NHS: Research and Development

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, every NHS trust or foundation trust has to oversee the governance of the research taking place within it. That is an inescapable part of the process. I do not think there is any confusion in anyone’s mind between support for research governance and the actual research itself, which is done by academics and clinicians working in academic and clinical departments. It is up to each trust to determine how its budget for research is allocated, but I can reassure my noble friend that the money is getting to where it needs to go.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, would the Minister agree that since Sally Davies took charge of how research is done within trusts, there has been a significant improvement in insuring that more of this money actually goes to serious translational research, which is an area that the health service really needs to concentrate on? I hope that the Minister will agree that that job has been done rather effectively.

NHS: Health Workers

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Lord’s Question addresses the central issue facing the NHS, which is how to deliver the best outcomes for patients and do so in the most cost-effective way. He is right to single out the role of Health Education England because I believe that, in conjunction with local providers who will be feeding in their view of what the workforce priorities are in their local areas, together with the Centre for Workforce Intelligence, which has a horizon-scanning capability, we can at last crack a nut that has been so difficult to crack in the past, that of good workforce planning in the NHS to make the workforce as productive and effective as we can. He is also right to single out the CQC because in areas such as staff ratios, the commission has a role in making sure that providers have thought about the right way to deliver care in individual settings.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, in order to produce a skilled workforce with wide diversity in the health service, one of the real needs is that of attracting more young people into this very large workforce. At the present time, as I think the noble Earl may be aware, there is massive resistance to having young people on work experience in the health service. All sorts of barriers are put up—risk of infection, lack of privacy and so on—most of which are absolute nonsense. Could the Minister do more to encourage the university trusts in particular to ensure that more young people can gain work experience in our hospitals?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Lord has made an extremely creative and important point, and I will gladly take it back to the workforce colleagues in the department.

NHS: Primary Care Trusts

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 17th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I do not have the figures for North Yorkshire in front of me but, as the noble Baroness is aware, there is a process for patients to make an exceptional case application to their primary care trust where the circumstances are deemed to be exceptional. We had a short debate about this matter the other day. However, there will inevitably be variation around the country in the extent to which treatments are seen as a priority for the local population in a given area.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, it is a question not just of treatment but of investigations for treatment. Only last week, I saw a couple complaining of long-standing infertility who were refused a laparoscopy or an X-ray of the uterus on the grounds that they were not permissible as investigations under the National Health Service. It was limited by their primary care trust. Would the noble Earl care to comment on that?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, if that case was a consequence of the primary care trust taking a blanket decision over a clinically valid investigation process then I would be very concerned and should be interested to hear the details from the noble Lord.

NHS: Definition of Exceptional Case

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, no, that is not the reason. My noble friend is quite right that this treatment has been around for a little while. However, it is not yet in mainstream practice. It is expensive, it is not routinely available in the NHS, and indeed NICE has published interventional procedure guidance which concludes that it,

“shows some short term efficacy, although most patients require insulin therapy in the long term”.

That does not seem to me to be a resounding endorsement of this treatment.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, will the Minister be kind enough to help us by defining what is meant by exceptional clinical needs?

[Earl Howe]

There is no clear-cut answer to that question. A patient might be suffering unusually severe symptoms from a given condition, or they might suffer from some comorbidity, with the result that in the absence of treatment his or her quality of life would be unusually severely affected. The underlying principle should be that the patient has some exceptional characteristic which would justify more favourable treatment being given to them than to the average patient with that condition.

Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, this has been an extraordinary parliamentary process. When this Bill was introduced, I said at Second Reading that it was a bad Bill. It was a bad Bill when it came here; there has been a growing tide of opposition to it and concern throughout the process while it was in the Commons and the Lords. There was the pause in the Commons and the Future Forum, which resulted in a large number of changes, and at that time Nick Clegg said that no Bill is better than a bad Bill. What we all individually have to do now—I speak very much for myself and not my party—is to assess whether it has now moved over from being a bad Bill to perhaps being, as Nick Clegg said last week, a much better Bill.

There is no doubt at all that on a spectrum of bad to good, it has shifted very considerably. It shifted in the Commons; it shifted far more here in the House of Lords. I believe that the process in your Lordships’ House has been the House of Lords at its best. This House can be proud of the work that it has done throughout the gruelling Committee stage, then during Report and again today. I regret that I could not take a detailed part in much of that, because I was then spending time as a patient of the NHS, but I have been watching it all and I believe that the work this House has done has been absolutely superb.

If I can make a party political point here for a moment, the work that our team has done on the Bill, led by my noble friend Lady Jolly with all my other noble friends who have taken part, has contributed well. I refer not only to the Liberal Democrats but to Cross Benchers and everybody around the House. Tribute has been paid to the Minister. I pay particular tribute as a Liberal Democrat to our person on the ministerial team, my noble friend Lady Northover, who from our point of view has played a very important part by being a link into the Government and getting many of the changes which have taken place.

It is about not just the changes to the Bill but the implementation—the work that starts after this Bill has been passed, as no doubt it will be today. A huge number of ministerial assurances have been made, which may or may not be put upon people’s bedroom walls as the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, wants to do with hers. Nevertheless, this is a Bill which has had more outside scrutiny and involvement from people out there, as far as the House of Lords is concerned, than any other Bill I can remember in 12 years in your Lordships’ House. That will continue with the implementation, and it is absolutely crucial how the Government now implement this Bill. Will it be gung-ho privatisation, which is what people were very frightened of when the Bill was first introduced and many are still frightened about, or will it be implemented in a cautious and careful way to allow the health service to breathe and to cope with the changes? This will be absolutely crucial, and we will know the answer to that in a year or two’s time.

The noble Earl, Lord Howe, said that we have had debates of unparalleled length and scope, and that is true. However, as I have just said, the public interest and lobbying on this from outside has been unprecedented. One of the lessons that we all have to learn is that we—whether the House of Lords, members of the Government or our party—have not coped with that very well. I do not think that the Opposition coped with it terribly well either because, even this morning, I was getting e-mails telling me what the Bill did, some of which was absolutely untrue. They were still telling me that the Bill removes the duty on the Secretary of State to provide health services. We are still getting that, and the amount of education or information which goes out from debates within this Chamber to the outside world is pretty poor.

Several people have said, “We have been trying to follow this Bill. We have been trying to follow your Marshalled Lists, having discovered where to find them on the internet. We have been trying to follow the parliament channel, and we haven’t understood a word of it. It is interesting, but we can’t understand it”. I have to tell them that that applies to quite a lot of Members of your Lordships’ House while the Bill is going through.

[Lord Winston]

Could the noble Lord tell us whether he intends to vote for or against the amendment?

[Lord Greaves]

I am coming to that. So having said all this, why am I going to vote for the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton? I will do so very unhappily because I do not like voting against my noble friends, particularly when they have done so much hard work and achieved so much. I do not like voting against the party anyway but, having looked at it, it seems to me that the safeguards which have been achieved are not sufficient. Having read the latest version of the Bill which we got at Third Reading, I think it is inevitable that this Bill will lead to greater commercialisation. It will lead to a greater emphasis on competition rather than integration, and to a continuing incursion of private sector-based companies into the provision of NHS services. It is undoubtedly a radical top-down restructuring, in direct contradiction of the coalition agreement that I signed up to. That is being imposed on the health service at the same time as it is struggling with the biggest financial problems that it has had for many years. This is all in the face of the overwhelming opposition of NHS staff, professional groups, patient groups, public opinion and, indeed, a majority of people in my own party and of people who vote for us.

I believe that the new structures at local level will be no less bureaucratic, less open and accountable—