Late Stage Hepatitis C

James Gray Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing an important debate. Does he agree that one problem that we face in tackling hepatitis C—he has outlined the scale of the problem; more than 200,000 people suffer from it—is the mixed messages coming from the Department of Health and, in particular, the information provided in an earlier debate in this Chamber by the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), who said that hepatitis C is not curable when in fact, with appropriate treatments, the cure rates are between 80% and 95%?

[Mr James Gray (in the Chair)]

Order. One must be brief in a half-hour debate.

[Stephen Pound]

One would almost think that my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) had had sight of my notes, because there will be, in a few moments, a section on that. The bullet point, my aide-mémoire, my prompt, is simply the two words “Good news”, because there is good news. One reason why we are having this debate is to tell people that there is a cure—a very successful rate of cure—but also to say that we need people to be able to access that and we need, above all, to have a plan.

Let me explain why I called for this debate. Many years ago, I had a private Member’s Bill on presumed consent for organ transplants. At that time, the then Secretary of State for Health, rather aggressively, said that it was not the business of the state to decide what happens to a person’s body after they have died. Lord Reid, as he now is, apologised to me afterwards for being quite aggressive, but one thing that it brought home to me was the difficulty of finding livers for transplant. Hepatitis C leads to cirrhosis of the liver in virtually every case, and in some cases that can then become acute liver failure, in which case one of the treatments would be a liver transplant. People think that is an easy solution when in fact it is not. As I discovered, livers for transplant are very difficult to get hold of—very hard to access.

Modern medical advances have opened up a completely new world. I will say more about that, and particularly the new therapies, in a moment, but there is still massive and widespread ignorance, and what I am asking the Minister for today is to have a plan for addressing that. I am reluctant, as is anybody, to give over-much credit to the Scottish Parliament, but on this occasion I have to say that the Scottish plan, the “Hepatitis C Action Plan for Scotland”, which is now six years old, does, if I may say so gently, represent a far more comprehensive and overarching strategy than we currently have in England.