Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill (First sitting)

Debate between John Glen and Rob Marris

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 8th November 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Rob Marris]

Q Or the other way round—what the market will bear. That is our concern.

Philip Kennedy: Or what the market will bear. Of course, in recent years, with the funding concerns, the price is only really going in one direction and that is putting a huge squeeze on niche product manufacturers. The other thing about the medical device sector, which goes back to the point about definition, is that there are some very specialised small businesses that work only within a certain sector. It is difficult to ask them to produce swathes of data to the same extent as a larger generic manufacturer or, indeed, large ostomy company that is quite accustomed to producing data for drug tariff.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Q This question is to Mr Kennedy and to Mr Ridge. With the data on the cost of medicines going up by over 7.5% in the last year—at a time when we have aggressive efficiency savings of £21 billion, or whatever it is, over the next few years—something needs to be done. To Mr Ridge, I am concerned that this is not radical enough. If we are really going to deal with the expected increases in medicine costs, we have got to do something more about innovation and the way that the NHS embraces innovation, so that we do not rely on Mr Kennedy’s members to provide what the NHS needs, which is wholly necessary at the moment, but the NHS could take more ownership of that. I would like you to reflect on that.

Mr Kennedy, in terms of the distribution of sales between what goes into the NHS and what goes into exports, surely one of the big justifications for the Government moving this forward is the fact that the rigour of the challenge, and the regulatory challenge, in the NHS—before medicines and devices that apply to the NHS—validates a considerable volume of export sales. I understand your difficulty in quantifying where your fixed costs are distributed over your NHS sales and exports, but nonetheless there is a massive advantage to supplying the NHS in terms of validating markets outside. How do you respond to that?

Dr Ridge: I am glad you asked that question, because the contribution of a particular component of the Bill is guesstimated at £88 million.