Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between George Freeman and Alistair Carmichael

Wednesday 15th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman]

Yes and yes.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

Next month, I will be joining the team from HyImpulse at the SaxaFord spaceport in Shetland to see the hot fire test of its new HyPLOX75 motor. Like many companies in the sector, it is very keen to know when we will get an announcement regarding the space flight phase 2 programme. When will we get that announcement? If we are not going to go ahead with that programme, what will the Government be doing to encourage companies like HyImpulse to do their business in Scotland?

[George Freeman]

I was in Scotland just a few weeks ago meeting the team behind the Shetland and Sutherland launch. We are committed to launch in both Cornwall and Scotland. We are providing funding to support those two spaceports. I will happily come and visit when I am next up. In Scotland, Buckinghamshire and all around the country, we are growing space clusters to give jobs and opportunities to a new generation.

Genomics and National Security

Debate between George Freeman and Alistair Carmichael

Wednesday 8th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (George Freeman)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for bringing this important issue to the House. He and I both know how important the subject is and that the Chamber is not full because of the business going on elsewhere. I reassure him that we take this issue very seriously. Some of things that we are doing are not in the public domain, for obvious reasons, but I will answer his questions. I agree with just about everything that he said, so we are very much on the same page.

Let me start, as the right hon. Gentleman did, by reminding listeners and viewers of what a success story British genomics has been, going right back to Watson and Crick’s famous pint in the Eagle in Cambridge—and, in this International Women’s Week and week of women’s science, let us not forget the third discoverer of DNA, the great Mary Black at King’s College London, who often gets left out of the story—through the work that Fred Sanger and his team did at the University of Cambridge on the structure of DNA and how it works, and right up to our leadership in genetic research and medicine in the UK.

It is worth saying that that leadership is not just in human genomics but in animal and plant genomics. I was recently up in Scotland visiting the Roslin Institute and the James Hutton Institute. Across the UK, we have such an understanding of not only genomics across humans, animals and plants, and their diseases, but the application of those genomics to help to develop drought-resistant crops for Africa and disease-resistant crops that do not need to be sprayed with highly carbon-intensive pesticides. The underpinning technology is fundamental to net zero and global sustainability, to allowing agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and to improving nutrition and health around the world. The front end now is cancer and rare disease, but the revolution in technology will drive sustainability and prosperity around the world over the coming decades.

I am delighted to respond to this debate, not least because, when I was the Minister for Life Science in the coalition Government, I had the great privilege of setting up Genomics England, which was our first big move to capture our leadership in this global race. I remind the House that we set up Genomics England very carefully as a reference library, not a lending library. Some 100,000 NHS volunteers and patients offered to be sequenced—it was not just the snip, which is the bit of DNA segment that we know is implicated in disease, but the whole of their genome. We could then look at whole-genome analysis at scale and link it to someone’s phenotype, life cycle and hospital records, and start to shine a light on the real insights into the mechanisms of disease. We might discover that men over the age of 55 with red hair, a beard and early-onset diabetes are more likely to respond to a particular drug than others. The work transforms not only the business of drug discovery but diagnosis, and it accelerates access for patients to treatments.

We originally focused GEL—Genomics England—on cancer and rare disease, which is where the appliance of genomics is most urgent and transformational, but we were clear that it was never going to be a lending library, so nobody would ever have access to an individual patient genome or an individual patient record. Researchers could interact with the database for the basis of research, but they would never be able to take out of the library any of the core data. I pay tribute to all the people at GEL, because in the 10 years since it was launched there have not been huge debates in Parliament or any scandals. People have not been marching up and down. In fact, thousands of NHS patients have happily enrolled and, through Biobank, we have taken the number of NHS volunteers to half a million. I pay tribute to the team behind that work. It is possible to build these datasets. We were absolutely clear that it was embedded in the values of the NHS: one for all, all for one, and shared data for national as well as personal good.

Alongside GEL, there is the UK Biobank, the National Institute for Health and Care Research BioResource, and now Our Future Health, which is looking at longitudinal datasets. We have not just done the deep science; we are building an ecosystem of genomically informed medical research and medicine in the NHS. I was particularly proud that we launched the NHS genomic medicine service. It is about not just science but research to drive better medicine in the NHS. In the NHS around the country, genomic medicine clinics are now accelerating access for researchers and patients.

The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland is right, as was the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), that we are in a global race in so many of these technologies, and particularly in genomics. In my recent speeches, I have set out what we mean by being a science superpower. It is not just a glib phrase. I define it not just as, first, world-class science—and with two of the world’s top three universities, we are a world-class research centre. To be a science superpower we need, secondly, to go out and solve some of the problems in the world, not just study them; thirdly, to recognise that science is conducted in international, global career paths and put the UK at the hub of those networks; fourthly, to insist on attracting much more industrial research and development, to help to drive this country out of post-pandemic recession and get long-term investment; and fifthly, and crucially, to insist on and stand up for the values on which science is conducted: free speech, critical thinking, respect for intellectual property and respect for law, in a collaborative setting. That is true on our own campuses—we will never be a science superpower if we have a cancel culture calling out and preventing free speech—and is equally true internationally. We will not be a superpower unless we take a stand against other countries that aggressively use science and steal intellectual property.

I have put the research security agenda right at the heart of our definition. Here in the UK, in 2020 we set out the Genome UK 10-year genetic healthcare strategy, with £175 million for life-saving programmes around cancer and rare diseases. We have set out the UK biological security strategy, recognising exactly the points made by the right hon. Gentleman about biosecurity in an interconnected world. In the pandemic, we saw the cost of disease to the global economy, as well as to our own, and we glimpsed the value of health and strong health resilience. That is biosecurity in terms of human health, but we are also in a world in which more and more food products and animal products are transported, and where climate change is driving new patterns of migration in insects and animals. There is a growing threat of infectious disease—pathogen biosecurity—which is one of the issues that our new economic security cabinet has looked at. We have now refreshed our biological security strategy.

Research security is at the heart of our international collaborations. Last year, I signed an agreement with Sweden, and there is a similar one with Thailand. In my work internationally, at the G7 Science Ministers summit in Japan this year and at the G20, we have led in putting research security on the table internationally as a key issue that we must all work on.

[Mr Carmichael]

I want to bring the Minister on to the point about BGI. I think we are aggressively agreeing with each other here, essentially because we are talking on parallel lines. Will he address the point about BGI and similar companies, and their need to comply or else be treated differently?

[George Freeman]

Absolutely; it is as if the right hon. Gentleman has read my notes.

Here in the UK, we are toughening up our regime. The National Institute for Health and Care Research has a set of very clear principles, as does UK Research and Innovation. We have set up the research collaboration advice team—RCAT—which is a new system to help all our researchers across the UK ecosystem with advice and support. We insist that they exercise due diligence if they sign a collaboration with, say, the “South China Sea research collaboration company”. We do not expect all our researchers to be policemen and women, but we do expect them—and they are now required—to show due diligence before they sign some lucrative research agreement.

We have set up RCAT as a specialist advisory group in the Cabinet Office, connected to our intelligence agencies, so that it can check quickly whether a partner is benign, hostile or dangerous. That system has been working well since we set it up a year ago. The team is in the Cabinet Office, 350 queries have been handled, and we are getting international visits from people who congratulate us on getting it right, although a lot more remains to be done.

I reassure the right hon. Gentleman that we have an economic security cabinet, which I joined three weeks ago. It looks much more strategically and in granular detail across exposure to hostile actors in the UK economy. That includes everything from genomics to the biosecurity piece that I have discussed, along with semiconductors, space and cyber-security—the whole piece. We are now in a global race not just with our benign competitors but with hostile actors who wish to use science and technology to hold us back and undermine us, or to steal our science and technology for their own use.

BGI is clearly one of those danger points in the ecosystem. I share with the House the fact that, in 2014, I was wheeled out to give a speech on the occasion of the visit of President Xi to the Guildhall. When President Xi and then Prime Minister Cameron were wheeled in, I was speaking to around 1,000 Chinese delegates about Genomics England. I had been prepared to pay tribute to the work of BGI when my officials pointed out that at that point Genomics England was suffering several hack attacks from BGI each week. That was a wake-up call for all of us.

We are well aware that we have to manage such risks properly. On that point, I commissioned and have literally just received from UKRI a detailed assessment of all the China research and innovation links across our system—we did the same last year for Russia. I have passed that through to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security. He and I, and our officials, will go through it shortly in detail, looking in particular at some of the actors such as BGI that we know to be aggressive in their international acquisition of intellectual property.

I reassure the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland that we have put research security at the heart of discussions at the G7 and G20. If we are to harness science and technology for global good and to deliver that extraordinary opportunity of helping to feed, fuel and heal emerging populations safely, international collaboration will be required. However, we have to ensure that we defend not only the values of good and open science but our own economic security, and that we get the balance right. We do not want to conduct research only with our strong, strategic, military partners, but we want to defend our values.

The right hon. Gentleman made an interesting point about critical national infrastructure that I will pick up in the economic security cabinet. It is a point that I have made in connection with another bit of our science infrastructure. We all recognise that the threats now mean that we need to think about the value of other infrastructure. I will come back to him on that.

The right hon. Gentleman made an important broader point about how the Government handle data. It is fair to say that the pandemic revealed the best and the worst, in a way. The NHS put together the world’s biggest clinical trial—not just bigger than the next one but bigger than the next 10, and faster than any of them—which was an incredible operation, embedded in the values of the NHS, and it worked brilliantly. Equally, the clunkiness of some testing data feedback from different towns and regions held back some decisions. I think the role of data will be rightly highlighted in the covid review.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for bringing this subject to the House. I will come back to him on the CPNI point. I look forward to pursuing the subject with him in future.

Question put and agreed to.

Post Office Historical Shortfall Scheme

Debate between George Freeman and Alistair Carmichael

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[George Freeman]

The right hon. Member makes a really important point. I will raise that specifically with the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam, and perhaps he can address it in his statement tomorrow. On behalf of the Government, I express our deep sympathies to those sub-postmasters mentioned today—to Tom and to those in Scotland, York and around the country. This is an injustice that must urgently be tackled.

[Mr Carmichael]

The best way to demonstrate a change of culture and good faith would be for the Post Office to start the whole process again from the beginning, instead of insisting that people who have made applications under a flawed process will have to see them through to the end and get less than they are entitled to as a consequence.

[George Freeman]

I understand the point that the right hon. Member is making. Let me include, for the record, the history of how we got to this situation. As part of the 2019 settlement, the Post Office committed to putting in place a scheme for those postmasters who were not part of that settlement and did not have criminal convictions related to the Horizon scheme. The historical shortfall scheme was set up to meet that commitment, and it is an important step. It opened in May 2020 and closed to applications later that year.

To be fair, the Post Office made significant efforts—quite rightly—to reach out to all postmasters, sending 7,000 individual letters to current postmasters and a further 20,000 to former postmasters. It is fair to say that the Post Office was quite surprised—I do not think that any of us in this room will have been—by the response. The scheme received over 2,300 eligible applications. I hear the points that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland made about the nature of that form. Because I am not the lead Minister on this, I have not looked at it, but he makes an important point, which I will raise with the Minister. The form needs to make clear to people what they are entitled to and needs not to discourage them from understanding their rights, the enforcement of which is long overdue.

The response to the HSS meant that the cost of the scheme went beyond what the Post Office could afford, and it turned to the Government as its 100% shareholder. The Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam, has set out that the Government will provide sufficient financial support to the Post Office to ensure that the historical shortfall scheme can proceed properly and that those people are fully compensated. I understand that that raises a question about the fairness for those who settled out of court, which is a point that the Minister will no doubt want to address. The Post Office is contributing from its own funds.