Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, many noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Andrews and Lady Walmsley, have made reference to the extremely strong—you might almost say scathing—report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. It is worth going back to its conclusions, in which it states that Ministers are

“given very wide powers to almost completely rewrite the existing regulatory regimes for human and veterinary medicines and medical devices”.

This Bill sees the Government seize control, rejecting the oversight and scrutiny of the elected Members in the other place and the technical experts here. In the best Trumpian style, it declares that the rules will be whatever they want them to be. Forget checks and balances, forget consultation and careful consideration; let Ministers rip. Indeed, that is what the Minister suggested he wanted in his opening remarks, focusing on speed of action, which would happen with scant parliamentary scrutiny. What he is suggesting is something new and radical.

Yet, as the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee points out, the Government claim elsewhere that this is like-for-like replacement of existing powers. The Government cannot have this both ways: it is either new and radical or just more of the same. However, the Minister is clearly right: this is new and radical, because what exists now is

“a mechanism for transposing into UK law EU rules on medicines and medical devices ... The new powers are subject to no such constraint”.

The answer here is not to concentrate power in the hands of the Government. The current system is clearly not good enough, but the answer is not to take away controls and oversight but rather to strengthen them through democracy, openness, a focus on the patient experience and independent expertise. As the Cumberlege report suggests, a commissioner for patient safety is crucial, and I am pleased to offer the Green group’s support for the noble Baroness’s proposed amendment, which she just outlined. We need a more democratic, listening approach, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, demonstrated so effectively, not a centralised, unchecked one, in which few have input.

Let us consider what the UK regulation might look like if the Bill goes through. We will have a Minister who will be bombarded by well-funded industry lobbyists on what the new rules should look like. A pharmaceutical company or a device manufacturer has not taken the Hippocratic oath. Their job—their legal obligation, in fact—is to maximise profits, and their profits are very large. As the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine suggested, an appropriate metaphor for the pharmaceutical industry is an 800-pound gorilla. “What does that do?” he asked rhetorically. Whatever it likes. Your Lordships’ House might like to contemplate the image of Matt Hancock up against that gorilla.

We have already seen drug companies flexing their muscle in the notable case of Selexipag—also known as Uptravi—using a patient representative group as cover for a massive lobbying effort. We know that pharmaceutical companies are lining up for a post-Brexit bonanza, increasing the price that the NHS pays for drugs. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, made clear in his excellent speech, there is a huge problem in our system with conflict of interest, which is only likely to grow.

I am most often talking about the disastrous model of US healthcare in the context of the rush to privatise our NHS, but a significant contributor to its disastrous and highly expensive outcomes is the political power of the pharmaceutical companies. This Bill is not “take back control”. This is “abandon control” and, when you are talking about medicines and medical devices from the industry that gave us thalidomide, the US opioid epidemic, Primodos and pelvic mesh, that is a frightening development.