Public Health England Hub Programme and Porton Down

John Glen Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Westminster Hall

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Robertson?

I have called this debate on the back of two similar debates in June 2010 and September 2013, several questions in the House, the lobbying of Ministers and meetings with officials over the past four years. Today, I urge the Minister critically to appraise the recommendations that she and her ministerial colleagues have received from the board of Public Health England to move significant elements of the PHE facility at Porton Down to a new site in Essex.

The UK Government have had capabilities at Porton Down for more than a century, which have evolved into a unique asset overseen by PHE. The facility is recognised around the world for its role in responding to some of the gravest threats facing mankind today. Indeed, several of my constituents have been deployed abroad to support the international response to the Ebola crisis, which is widely reported in the media.

However, it is well known that the facilities at Porton Down have been in need of a substantial upgrade to remain fit for purpose. Until 2009, the board of the Health Protection Agency, PHE’s predecessor organisation, felt that its objectives would be best achieved by expanding and redeveloping the existing site at Porton. The PHE board has submitted three different business cases—in June 2010, April 2012 and, after a two-year gap, in 2014 —as it has sought to justify its intention to create a single science hub in Harlow. The PHE board has submitted the outline business case to Ministers, and the preferred option is to collocate its assets on a new campus in Harlow modelled on the USA’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The latest publicly available analysis from Professor George Griffin’s 2012 due diligence report disclosed that the Harlow option would produce a mere 2.6% cost saving for the Treasury compared with redevelopment with Porton, over a 68-year time frame.

I want to use the debate to highlight the risks associated with relocating such a sensitive facility. PHE’s primary mandate is to

“protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing”.

Some of the work done at PHE Porton, especially translational research into taking products from the workbench to commercial markets, arguably does not fit comfortably in that mission statement. Consequently, I am led to believe that the business case does not fully assess the potential of a redeveloped site at Porton to drive growth in the UK life sciences sector. The Government clearly view that sector as important to the UK economy, given that they selected one of our colleagues to become Minister with responsibility for life sciences in the July reshuffle. I emphasise the critical importance of translational research and urge the Minister to be the one who finally unleashes PHE’s full potential at Porton in that area.

Public Health England Porton is on course to generate £65 million in external revenues this year; it receives just £8 million in funding from the Department of Health. PHE Porton is operating in an increasingly competitive global environment where outcomes are harder to achieve, and it is doing so very successfully. Understandably, PHE’s primary mandate is not about seizing commercial opportunities, and the translational research capability at Porton has arguably never been fully realised, and its potential never fully exploited, as a consequence.

One of the key arguments for relocating to Essex is that Harlow is ideally sited between London and Cambridge, which would allow PHE to establish links with companies and research institutions based there. My fear, however, is that that argument is flawed because the team at Porton has never been disadvantaged by its current location. As the useful document from the Porton life sciences group sets out, the team at Porton currently works with more than 250 partners across the world, including more than 130 universities, the US Government, five international health agencies, nine global pharmaceutical companies and more than 60 small and medium-sized enterprises. The list includes more than 30 entities currently based in London or Cambridge.

In 2012, the Boston Consulting Group carried out a comprehensive study of the drivers of research productivity in 420 life science companies. The study found that location was not a key factor and that accumulated research expertise was twice as significant. PHE Porton has some 3,750 years of scientific acumen relating to infectious disease in its ranks. Almost half of those individuals are operating above PhD level. PHE argues that new staff can easily be moved or recruited to Harlow and that it is a desirable place to work, but the fact remains that, when the staff at Porton were last surveyed, just 7%, or one in 14, were inclined and prepared to move.

I find it perplexing that in the modern age, when the Government are increasingly looking beyond geographical borders for commercial opportunities, when digital by default is the preferred option and when the Government are actively seeking to disperse their functions outside the south-east, Ministers could accept a plan that flies in the face of those aspirations. The entire business case is dependent on the premise that an organisation will be more effective if its staff and resources are in one location, but across PHE employees perform a wide range of functions, many of which have little day-to-day operational co-dependency.

The idea that a physical hub will result in “water cooler conversations” leading to improved research outcomes is, at best, highly questionable. The private sector left that mindset and approach long ago in favour of more effective use of technology and flexible working practices. The outline business case also makes the assumption that existing partnerships will be able to continue operating effectively throughout at least a 10-year transition period.

I want to imagine a different scenario in which Porton is finally given the operational freedom to capitalise fully and extend its current external research relationships, as I have consistently suggested in debates in the House over the past four years. Other Departments have recognised the potential of what exists at Porton. On the same day that Public Health England’s board made public its recommendation to move to Harlow, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced an investment of several million pounds to establish a new science park at Porton, which was supported by the local authority, Wiltshire council, and the local enterprise partnership. The science park will be next door to Public Health England and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. The Department of Health’s first spin-off company emerged from PHE Porton, and one of the reasons why the science park was conceived was to provide space for similar likely companies in the future.

Imagine if the ambition of the universities of Oxford and Southampton to create a second corridor of excellence to rival Cambridge and London could be fostered. The regional life sciences industry proposed to create a new national centre for translational vaccinology, which the Medical Research Council could not support further because of the uncertainty around PHE at Porton Down. The project is not some blue-sky ambition proposed at the last moment, either. There are signed expressions of interest from two multinational pharmaceutical companies and SMEs across the region. It is not a new project but one that has developed from existing working relationships. The university of Southampton, for example, is involved in more than 30 projects with PHE Porton, such as the one awarded $1.4 million by the US National Institute of Health last month to continue its groundbreaking work on tuberculosis treatments.

I will now discuss PHE Porton’s one geographical partnership that depends on physical location. The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory is currently located immediately adjacent to PHE, and there is a natural synergy in the work that the two organisations do and the security arrangements that they share. I am told that staff have worked particularly closely in emergencies. They have a close historical connection, their staff share a number of unique competencies and both organisations retain a significant proportion of the UK’s containment level 4 laboratories.

Although I understand that greater collaboration with DSTL has nominally been considered as part of the single science hub programme, I seek reassurance that that option has been fully evaluated, particularly in light of what I know to be the willingness of DSTL’s management to embrace the programme. It has been known since 2008 that there is spare capacity in DSTL’s high containment facilities, as Professor Griffin told the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills. He reported in 2012 that it is important that the relationship is preserved:

“A move to Harlow would not prevent collaboration with DSTL but it would be more difficult, particularly since outside the UK ‘Porton Down’ is perceived as being managed more under common control than it really is and this carries considerable brand value.”

I emphasise that point. When the Prime Minister said that our laboratories had confirmed that there were chemical weapons in Syria, he referred not to DSTL or PHE labs but to our labs at Porton Down. The media reports on samples of Ebola being sent to “our experts at Porton.” Porton has a global reputation built up over several decades, which Harlow will need to work hard even to establish.

Although I fully concede the need to do what is best for the national public health interest as a whole, my concern is that the translational research function and the complex relationships and revenue generation activities that have been built up over many years will be put at serious risk if the outline business case is accepted as is. Given the pace of technological change, the notion of a single science hub might become redundant, too. Earlier this week I met my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), the new Minister with responsibility for life sciences, and he is a great believer in the power of genome sequencing to revolutionise care in the NHS. He will know that the direction of travel undermines the case for physical collaborations as more laboratory-based diagnostic work is replaced by computer-based modelling.

Before approving the plan, I ask the Minister to be sure that the business case contains a rigorous analysis of the issues of transitioning and recruiting teams of world-class scientists and that the security concerns about sensitive work, which we hear nothing about, are not optimistically handled in the business case. Please be sure that the economic value associated with 10-year contracts with the US Government and other external parties will not be seriously jeopardised during an extended, uncertain transitional period in which facilities at both Porton and Harlow will need to co-exist.

Perhaps more importantly, I urge the Minister to recognise that, although translational science may not be core to the entity that is currently Public Health England, it is certainly core to the UK’s life sciences industry. Please be sure that the outline business case demonstrates conclusively that the commercial opportunities for PHE will be significantly improved by relocating to Harlow and that the anticipated gains clearly outweigh the opportunity to create a new world-leading corridor of translational vaccinology in the south-west at Porton.

I stand here today, for the third time in an Adjournment debate since I was elected in 2010, not because I want to articulate a narrow “keep the jobs in my constituency at all costs” argument. My primary concern is that this decision is motivated by a misjudged desire to tidy up different entities within the PHE organisation into a single site, when the day-to-day functional synergies of the different components of PHE are not significant, the advantages of co-location are notional, uncosted and unproven and most of all, sadly, the risks to the life science sector and the international Porton Down brand are so significant that they render the recommendation to proceed with the Harlow option even more questionable.