Covid-19 Update

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

As I said in response to a question earlier, whatever the rules—whether for this pandemic or anything else—they apply equally to everyone. With regard to Downing Street, as the Prime Minister has said today, there will be an investigation, and we should all await the outcome of that.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

If bed capacity is the problem, were we right to close the Nightingale wards, and are they available for reopening? If so, does he expect to have to reopen them?

[Sajid Javid]

My right hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that we will be taking measures to increase substantially capacity in the NHS. He will know that it is not just about beds, whether Nightingale or elsewhere, but having the right amount and type of workforce to help with those beds.

Covid-19 Update

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

Yes, I can give the hon. Gentleman that assurance.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

As someone who, very thankfully, received his booster jab last Thursday at the outstanding St Thomas’ Hospital, may I ask the Secretary of State why certain groups and communities seem to fear vaccination? Which are those groups and communities, and what can be done to persuade them that they are wrong?

[Sajid Javid]

There are many communities where vaccine take-up is lower than others. That has particularly been the case in the black African community in Britain and in some other black and minority ethnic communities—that has improved significantly over the past two to three months. The same is also the case in many other European countries and the US. A huge amount of work is being done through community leaders and communication campaigns, and by offering access to the vaccine in as many different ways as possible to encourage take-up.

Health and Care Bill

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

I know my hon. Friend well and entirely understand the perspective that he brings, but I would argue as a counterpoint that the Bill strikes a proportionate balance, in the same vein as with seatbelts and other issues. Alongside personal choice and giving people the information to make choices, I believe that it is a proportionate and balanced approach—not the thin end of the wedge, as he might suggest, although perhaps I am characterising his words unfairly.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Edward Argar]

May I make a little more progress? I have more to say on obesity, so my right hon. Friend should not worry.

We held two consultations, the first in 2019 and the second in 2020, which have informed our policy on introducing further restrictions to the advertising of less healthy food and drink products. I welcome the devolved Administrations’ engagement and support for the policy, which is being brought forward UK-wide. The UK Government have engaged with them extensively on the matter since early 2021; I put on the record my gratitude for the spirit in which they have approached it.

[Dr Lewis]

I happen to agree that there is a question of proportionality on the alleged nanny state issues, but does my hon. Friend agree that where an issue is contentious—such as the fluoridation of water supplies, which has been contentious over many years in this House—it should be properly debated before the state takes control of it, not just tucked away at the end of a very long Bill? That causes me concern.

[Edward Argar]

I take my right hon. Friend’s point, but I would argue that we are placing the matter before the House in a Bill that has been debated and has gone through its stages, including one of the longest Committee stages of a Bill in my time in this House. There is, or was, the opportunity for Members to table amendments on Report on the aspect that he mentions, and I suspect that it will be extensively debated in the other place as well. I take his point, but I would argue that we have provided sufficient time and have brought the issue to the House in that way.

[Dr Lewis]

Would the Minister be as surprised as I was to know that quite a lot of Members of this House are completely unaware that that provision has been added at the end of the Bill?

[Edward Argar]

All I would say—without in any way implying any criticism of right hon. or hon. Members—is that soon after I entered the House I was a member of the Procedure Committee for a year, and one of the first pieces of advice I was given was to read the legislation and go through it in its entirety. I recognise that this is a long and complex piece of legislation, but I would make that point.

Telecommunications and internet services are reserved matters. The UK Government are clear about the fact that the primary purpose of provisions on the advertising of less-healthy food and drink for TV and internet services is to regulate content on reserved media, and on that basis the policy is reserved. The purpose is not incidental. Therefore, the provisions do not fall within the competence of the devolved legislatures or engage the legislative consent process. While the Scottish and Welsh Governments have agreed with our policy ambitions, they disagree with our legal assessment, and thus far we have had to agree to disagree on this matter, but we have had extensive engagement, and I suspect that we will continue to do so. I see that the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire is in her place, and while she is present I would like to thank both Governments for their engagement and offer my assurances that it will continue as we implement the policy for the benefit of citizens across the UK.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Hancock]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

A further point that is being ignored by those who are trying to make a meal of this new clause is that the cutting of the daily cost offset is much more valuable to those on low incomes than any change in the cap, because the cap, by its nature, is there to protect assets, and those who do not have many assets gain far more benefit from the cut in the daily cost that would otherwise clock up their contributions to the cap much more slowly.

Taken together, these elements make up a package that is beneficial to those on low incomes. It helps to make the system fairer.

My final point on new clause 49 is this. For years and years—including the years when I was Secretary of State, and including the entire 13 years when Labour was in power—nobody fixed the problem of social care. This Government have come forward with a package, and if we pull apart one part of the package, there is a risk to the package as a whole. As Sir Andrew Dilnot said on the radio this morning,

“the whole package is a significant step forward”.

It is always easy in politics, and in life, to say, “I just accept the bits of the package that I like”—and, in the case of the Labour party, to say, “I accept the bits that are very expensive for taxpayers.” Instead, we must look at the package as a whole, which is funded, and which can be delivered, for the first time in several decades, because it hangs together. The Government have presented a whole package, and it is the best possible option in the fiscally constrained times in which we live.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I am sorry to be unhelpful to my right hon. Friend, but if this element is so integral to the overall package, why was it not brought forward right at the beginning?

[Matt Hancock]

This part of the package was described in September, because it was made clear in September that the £86,000 cap was a cap on individual costs. It did not say then that that included the costs that local government may make on someone’s behalf. I think it is a strong Conservative principle that, when we say we are capping the costs that an individual pays, we do not include the costs that another part of the state should pay. I think that that was clear, and more details have now been set out. Most importantly, this is a package that takes things forward in a way that has not been achieved for decades.

Medical Cannabis: Alleviation of Health Conditions

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) and have worked with him actively in the past few years on this issue, and I wish we had made more progress. I am delighted to welcome the Minister to her place, answering this debate. I have an interest recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests on this, but it is a non-financial interest. It is in recognition of the fact that I chair an organisation that I have set up, the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group Ltd, whose objective is to find the resources to bring arguments based on science and research into this debate, on all of drugs policy, and to have this academically peer-reviewed, so that the arguments for the huge challenge of a policy change that is required can be put in a proper, calm way, based on all the available evidence and a proper scientific assessment of that evidence.

I say to the Minister at the beginning of my remarks that this issue is not just about medicine from cannabis. That is one element and one casualty of how we have conducted our nation’s drug policy over the past five or six decades, but it is a huge missed opportunity. My journey into this issue arose as prisons Minister, when I saw the impact of taking a criminal justice approach to drug misuse as the first lever, rather than a public health approach. As I saw at first hand, the cost to the criminal justice system is just enormous. Indeed, the Government’s own statistics talk of a cost in the order of £19 billion a year. When one then thinks that half of acquisitive crime in the UK is driven by drug misuse and drug addiction, we see that we should be asking some serious questions about the whole of our drugs policy.

However, that is a separate debate. It was made clear to me when I became the first Conservative to co-chair the all-party group on drug policy reform, when I decided to make this issue one of my central areas of focus, after I ceased to be chair of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, that we needed to focus on the arguments for medicine, which had not been able to be researched and developed because of our drugs policy. Focusing on the arguments associated with prohibition and criminal justice, and the parallels with alcohol in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, is not where the discussion is; the Government are completely clear on where their policy sits on those issues. There is now a big global debate on those issues, with a Global Commission on Drug Policy reform, but it was put to me that we must focus on getting medicines from cannabis for the people who are suffering because they are not able to get access to it.

I became co-chair of the all-party group in September 2017 and I took the advice I was given by people who had been in this field rather longer than I had, and we got behind the family of Alfie Dingley. A national newspaper had got involved and a petition was signed by 300,000 people. The family had gone to a holiday camp in Holland in order to access medicine from cannabis, because they could not get it in the UK. The Bedrocan oil that Alfie was getting then stopped his epileptic fits, but the family had run out of money, so they had to come back to the UK and they could not access the medicine here. On the day of the presentation of the petition to Downing Street, I was able to ask an urgent question in the House on the matter. The issue was raised with Ministers and we were given assurances that the Dingley family were going to be helped to find their way through the complicated licensing process in order to enable Alfie to be able to access the medicine. Three months later, of course, they still had not got it. The cost of the licence application process—simply buying the licences to access this oil—was £20,000; we are talking about £5,000 a licence, so enormous barriers were put in the way.

Then we had the case of Charlotte Caldwell and her epileptic son Billy, who had been in the United States getting treatment. When they returned to the UK, wisely doing so via Dublin, because she lived in Northern Ireland, her GP gave her a prescription for the medicine she had brought back from the US. When the manufacturer of that medicine changed and it became a Canadian company, she needed a new prescription, at which point it all fell apart. The doctor was told, “You are not allowed to prescribe that medicine for this epileptic child to stop him having his fits.” With the support of Richard Branson and others, Charlotte went to Canada, collected the medicine, came back and presented it to customs at Heathrow on the Monday, when it was confiscated. By the Thursday the boy was in hospital fitting, and his consultants were on the steps of the hospital saying, “It really doesn’t matter. What is unacceptably cruel is to take a medicine that is working off a child.” The current Health Secretary, to his huge credit, then issued a special licence for Billy Caldwell to be able to get his medicine back from customs. That led to the then chief medical officer being invited to offer an opinion as to whether there was anything in this cannabis stuff as far as medicine is concerned. It only took her two weeks to come back with a strongly affirmative answer, based on the evidence available around the world. That then led to the regulations that the Government passed in November 2018, which have not solved the issue. As the hon. Member for Inverclyde said, only three prescriptions have been made on the NHS.

You will be familiar, Madam Deputy Speaker, as we all are in our constituencies, with the position of multiple sclerosis sufferers. There are about 50,000 people in this country growing their own medicine. They are committing quite a serious criminal offence in the process, but they are trying to treat their health condition. What we have failed to do on the back of the regulations passed in November 2018 is get an evidence-based approach to medicine from cannabis, and educate the health service, prescribing doctors and the rest about the potential benefits and how we should have developed a position from the first go at the regulatory change in 2018.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a fascinating case, because I, like many other Members of the House, I am sure, thought that this problem had largely been solved. Why does he think it is that the Government or the Department find it is so difficult to grip this? I recall having back surgery 35 years ago and being very grateful for some pain relief. I asked whether I could have some more, but I was told, “No, you can’t, because it is morphia. It is related to heroin and you might get addicted.” If it was possible properly to prescribe something related to heroin for a proper medical condition 35 years ago, why can something similar by way of the arrangements needed not be sorted out for this particular problem?

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

I have seen the fundraisers online, as other hon. Members will have. When people have to raise that amount of money each month, they must not be able to do anything else and they must live with that anxiety constantly. We want to relieve people of that as far as we can.

We know that the number getting through has been dreadfully low. The previous Minister said in February that 413 unique eligible patients had been identified, but no estimate had been made of the number who had received prescriptions. End Our Pain believes that only three prescriptions have been issued on the NHS—goodness me, that is not what we thought it would be three years ago. If the Minister has more up-to-date information, we would be keen to hear it, but there is definitely a sense that it is not going anywhere near far enough.

Last year, a Care Quality Commission report found that a meagre 6.5% of cannabis-based items were prescribed on the NHS. Again, that is a paradox because we are told that there is real anxiety about prescribing it, but if people pop it into a search engine, they can find an awful lot of private treatments that do not seem anxious at all—there seem to be fewer shy bairns there. I am not sure that that is quite the defence that those who use it think it is.

It is a matter of justice if people are missing out or are left with the horrendous choice between paying over the odds for medication and suffering. The founding principle—the settled political point—of the national health service is that we do not tolerate that or think that people’s access should be based on their ability to pay, but we are tolerating that here, so I hope we can do better.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I have been looking at the Hansard of yesterday’s debate—there is an opportunity for the Minister to refer to it when she makes her remarks—and I see that one of the main points she made yesterday was the fact that there is insufficient evidence on the safety aspects and the possible harm effects. Given that families are paying all this money and finding other ways of getting the cannabis-based products, would it be a way forward if families were asked to sign a waiver if it were prescribed, so that the people doing the prescribing would be protected against any subsequent action if in fact something went wrong? It might be for the family to take that decision on the balance of benefit and harm.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for that intervention. I am slightly torn in the sense that I have absolutely no doubt that families would take it on that basis, but as a former trade union official, I would never have advised a member to sign away their rights. I think that is what we are getting at when the hon. Member for Reigate says that we have to come up with something creative that means we can clear this hurdle, and that is one such option.

Let me link that back to a previous intervention by the right hon. Member for New Forest East on opiates—if you will briefly indulge a thought experiment, Mr Deputy Speaker. If the reverse were true and we routinely prescribed cannabis-based products to deal with pain issues, would anybody really be advocating at the Dispatch Box that we should instead swap them for opiates and that they would be a better alternative? I think the answer to that is an obvious one, and that should be guiding our thinking.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Caulfield]

Absolutely. The Government are committed to trying to resolve the blockage to licensing, which is the main factor hindering the prescription of these drugs. The Health and Social Care Secretary changed the law when he was Home Secretary, but that was not the end of the issue, and that is why we are taking these next steps. It is important not to dismiss the importance of licensed medication. We know from history that when medication that may have a good clinical effect is not tested thoroughly, there can be grave consequences, just as with thalidomide. The safety of a medicine is as important as its efficacy. I am not casting aspersions on cannabis, but the regulator has responsibility for all medicines, and it takes that issue very seriously.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

That argument would surely carry more weight if the people doing the testing outlined some sort of timeline and plan for concluding a testing programme, rather than apparently letting things drift on aimlessly for years on end.

[Maria Caulfield]

I take my right hon. Friend’s point. I will come on to that, and to timelines for the research that is in progress. Many of the products that we are talking about have not been licensed by any licensing authority across the world, including the Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency and our domestic MHRA. This is not just a UK problem; it is not the UK Government who are holding this back.

As I said yesterday, I encourage manufacturers of these products to invest in clinical trials. Part of the Department’s work is providing funding for the National Institute for Health Research, which is actively opening its arms to charities, academics, researchers, manufacturers and third-sector organisations. Funding is available for clinical trials, if anyone wants to come forward with one, be it a randomised control trial, an observational study, a randomised control trial without a placebo arm, or a phase 1, 2 or 3 clinical study. The MHRA is willing to provide advice and support to any potential applicants who want to conduct a clinical trial or seek a licence for their medicines. There is funding and support; we need researchers to come forward with clinical trials.

Covid-19 Vaccinations: 12 to 15-year-olds

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

To what extent does the vaccination of a child reduce his or her liability to transmit the virus to a vulnerable person such as an elderly grandparent?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I will happily write to my right hon. Friend with the data that the JCVI and the CMOs have looked at. Suffice it to say that the data that I have looked at from the United Kingdom, where we have not embarked on a children’s vaccination programme but are about to, is that 60% of those who are double-vaccinated do not become infected with the delta variant, which is the dominant variant at the moment, and therefore cannot transmit and infect others; 40% can.

Covid-19 Update

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Yes, I will.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Is there any risk to older age groups who, because they are more vulnerable, had both jabs earlier, that the effectiveness of those jabs might wear off sooner and that there might be a gap of vulnerability before they can get their booster shots?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My right hon. Friend is right to highlight that there is a group of older patients who received both doses with a three-week dosing interval, not a 12-week dosing interval. They will be our priority when it comes to boosters. The data from Cov-Boost is imminent, as I said earlier. The system is ready and primed to go as soon as we have that data, so that we boost the most vulnerable, including the group to which he refers, as quickly as possible to offer that additional protection.

Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy]

I completely agree and thank the right hon. Gentleman for bringing this debate forward and championing it from the other side of the House. He correctly says that we need to have all that evidence so that people can give that informed consent.

Finally, the report recommends establishing specialist treatment centres

“to provide comprehensive treatment, care and advice”.

Some of these care centres are being established, which is good news, but again there are concerns about the data collection on patient outcomes after mesh removal and not all women are having all their mesh removed—some of this is only a partial removal. Again, what questions are being asked and what data is being collected? I have submitted numerous written parliamentary questions to the Department but have yet to receive a clear answer on exactly what data will be collected.

There are also important questions to be answered on the competence of surgeons to undertake removals. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) has a very difficult story on this issue. The Department says that it is for individual trusts to decide which surgeons to use for removals, but I do not share that view. How can it be fair to ask a woman to return to the same surgeon who put the mesh in, causing her all that harm, in order to have it removed? I really think we need to look at this issue again.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The situation is even worse than the hon. Lady suggests, because in some cases these surgeons, who have now been appointed as lead figures in the mesh centres, are the people who not only put the mesh in but then persisted in denying that the mesh was the cause of any of the terrible problems their victims had suffered.

[Emma Hardy]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman and completely agree with his point.

We are now one year on from publication of the Cumberlege review. Of course I accept that there has been a pandemic, but there is nothing to stop the Government accepting the recommendations. We would all be quite realistic and understand that the Government can accept the recommendations but that there would have to be a delay in implementing them, because of the pandemic. That would be fine, but they have not. They have implemented only two recommendations, on an apology and on the appointment of a patient safety commissioner.

Given the lack of progress and the concerns that I have outlined, to which I know colleagues here will add further, I urge the Government to reconsider the implementation taskforce. The problems identified by the review are systemic and of long standing and, if unaddressed, will condemn more to a lifetime of suffering. It is essential that they are brought to an end, and to do so the review’s recommendations must all be implemented in full.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I must say it is quite hard to speak unemotionally after hearing the tragic story that the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Allan Dorans) has relayed to the House. How much more difficult must it have been for Baroness Cumberlege to hear dozens, if not hundreds, of such stories of individual human suffering? She came up with a truly magnificent report and the House of Commons had what I thought was one of its best days for a long time when we discussed it, in no small measure due to the Minister for Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries) and her response to the report. We would all have felt quite justified in thinking that, at last, there was real light at the end of this horrible, terrible, awful tunnel, but it does not seem that we have got to the end of it yet.

I took from Baroness Cumberlege’s report one particular area of hope, and that was the establishment of the specialised mesh centres, and I wish to focus in my contribution on three questions. First, are the mesh centres truly dedicated and comprehensive one-stop shops offering all the types of treatment likely to be needed and all the types of investigation likely to be required, if not under one roof, then at least within a single footprint, or are they merely specialists hubs in name only?

Secondly, there is another problem related to the centres. Are we seeing a situation in which surgeons who could have been described as mesh problem deniers are now reinventing themselves as mesh problem remediators? I do not think they are qualified to hold that role. I fear that there is an attitude of mind that says, “Well, it’s not that easy to find people who specialise in this area, and therefore, even though these are the people who put the mesh in, maybe they are the people who are best qualified to take the mesh out.” I absolutely refute that. Not only did those people put the mesh in, but when the patients came along time and again to say what terrible problems they were suffering, those were the people who refused to listen to them. They were the people who, in some cases, insisted on putting more mesh in, and they were the people who, in other cases, refused to let the patients have a referral to figures such as Miss Sohier Elneil in London or Professor Hashim Hashim in Bristol, who are—or were at that time—the true, and possibly the only, specialists in mesh removal.

When I was thinking about what to say in the light of what had gone before, I was debating whether I should use the word “butchered”, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) did use it in his most powerful speech and I will use it as well. The idea that someone who has butchered your body is an appropriate person for you to go back to, after all that, and that they could then say they are going to take the mesh out, when that person may well have stood in the way of your perhaps going to see Miss Elneil or Professor Hashim, who could have done something for you, is unconscionable.

My third question is: what research is being undertaken on new methods of safe removal? If indeed it is the case that an argument is going to be made that there might be some future use for mesh in safer ways, what research is being done to see whether or not something could be developed that would not run the risks of this disaster?

I shall say something very fanciful now, and it is probably nonsense, but the thought occurs to me, hearing about the way in which the flesh grows around the mesh, the mesh fractures and it becomes so very difficult to remove: has anybody ever thought that it might be possible to develop a future type of mesh, if this is not possible with the mesh that has already been put inside people, that might conceivably be harmlessly dissolved within the body if something went wrong, by the addition some sort of chemical? That may be absolute nonsense, but the point is that unless specialist research is carried out, this sort of botching and butchery is going to continue.

As a result of the three constituency cases that I originally cited in a debate on—it is hard to believe that it is more than three years ago—19 April 2018, I have received certain amounts of information and concerns from Kath Sansom, who does such wonderful work with the Sling the Mesh group. I conveyed a message to her and basically said, “If you were standing up in this place today, what points would you like to put over?” She said:

“The debate is calling for all Cumberlege recommendations to be implemented without further delay, including financial redress for women and sweeping reform of the healthcare and regulation framework. Women are losing hope that they have been properly listened to. They need urgent financial redress for the many losses they have suffered. They want to know also when they go to a specialist centre that it is not a postcode lottery of care. To date the specialist centres are special in name only.”

In other words, is there really a new centre, or are people being sent from pillar to post for all the different parts of the investigations and having to wait months between each particular appointment for each particular type of investigation?

Kath also said:

“There has been no national training programme and no agreed way to measure success—they haven’t even agreed on outcome logging measures to standardise the data capture.”

She also made the point, which I think I have made strongly enough, about some of the centres

“being run by pro mesh surgeons who have denied mesh is a problem”.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I said this in my speech, but it is worth emphasising again. We are talking about what needs to be done and what is happening, but we must also come back to people; as my right hon. Friend says, people are very important. Women are killing themselves. They are killing themselves. Look at the suicide rates for women with mesh problems and endometriosis. Women go through crippling pain, and dozens a year are taking their own lives. Does that not make the point that my right hon. Friend is making—that we have to move more quickly on this?

[Dr Lewis]

It totally does. I shall share a little something with the House. Although it does not compare with the agony of what these women are going through, I lost a year and a half of my life when I was given some inappropriate treatment that resulted in my being unable to read for a year and a half during my early 20s. What really made it worse was the knowledge that, if I had not asked for a particular treatment to try to improve my tired eyes because I was studying, none of it need have happened. How much worse must it be for these women, many of whom are not only undergoing all this suffering, but are undergoing it because they were told it was a minor procedure and they thought, “Oh, well—maybe I will have it, then.” If only they had known, they would never have gone within a mile of it. They must be saying that, over and over again. To expect them to go back to the same surgeons who did not tell them what the consequences could be is inhumane and totally unrealistic.

The issue of some people having a financial interest in promoting certain products has been touched on. We are obliged to declare our interests in this House and perhaps something like the Physician Payments Sunshine Act would be the equivalent for people in this context.

Finally, Kath draws attention to what she calls a black hole in official statistics. She says, for example, that according to hospital statistics, in the year 2008-09, 1,038 women were readmitted to hospital with problems within 30 days of a mesh sling having been implanted. In comparison, data derived from surgeons says that only 104 women were admitted to hospital—that is something like 10% of the total. Some 934 women have somehow gone missing from the surgeons’ data.

These are strange and disturbing features. This House has shown itself at its best in condemning what happened. The Government need to build on that and put in place the measures recommended by the report to make it far less likely that it could happen again.

Covid-19 Update

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The right hon. Lady and I have had this exchange before. I respect her enormously, but she continues to imply that we should have taken decisions based on data that we did not yet have. That is simply not a reasonable position for the Chair of any Select Committee to take.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The statistical snapshot that my right hon. Friend gave in his statement showed that just over 2% of people hospitalised with the Indian variant had had both jabs. In order to encourage everyone to get vaccinated, will he in future publish on a daily basis how many patients in hospital with covid have previously had one jab, two jabs or no jabs at all? If that information is not held centrally, should it not be?

[Matt Hancock]

I am delighted by that question, because the data that I put in my statement was right off the press—it is new data. I am absolutely happy to look at how it is published and on what basis. I hear my right hon. Friend’s call for it to be published daily; we do update most of this data daily on the website. We have not got to that point yet—we have done a first cut of the data up to 3 June, as I read out—but the critical question is how many cases are translating into hospitalisations and then into deaths. I am very glad that we were able to do the first cut today, and I will see what I can do on publication.

Covid-19 Update

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

No.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Given that we believe in people taking responsibility for their own actions, will my right hon. Friend confirm that the refusal of a minority to accept vaccination is no reason to delay the lifting of restrictions on society as a whole?

[Matt Hancock]

That is an important point. We do not have mandatory vaccinations in this country. We do encourage as much uptake is possible, but with the percentages for uptake well into the 90s among the groups who have been offered the vaccine, it is clear that we will be able to get very high levels of coverage and therefore lift restrictions. I hope will be able to lift restrictions on the basis of the dates in the timetable set out but, as per my answer earlier, we will also monitor the data on the impact between each one.

National Security and Investment Bill

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

On Second Reading both of this Bill and of the Telecommunications (Security) Bill, it was mentioned that in 2013, the Intelligence and Security Committee first recommended measures to prevent high-risk vendors such as Huawei from penetrating our critical national infrastructure in future. It is always the way: you wait seven years for a Bill to protect against infiltration and takeover, then two come along together.

Given that background, the ISC naturally welcomed the introduction of this legislation, and we greatly appreciated the contact that we have had with the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi). Not only did he keep his promise to write to us about the points made by Committee members on Second Reading, during my period of self-isolation, but he dealt with ISC concerns at the Committee stage and reached out before today’s debates as well. That is precisely the type of constructive engagement that we should like to have with the Government. If I do not secure the concessions that I want after all of that, I shall be very disappointed!

The issue on which I shall focus is parliamentary oversight. Normally, that would be straightforward. As the future arrangements laid down by the Bill will depend on the input of the new investment security unit, and as that unit will be housed in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, one would normally expect that general scrutiny could be conducted by Parliament as a whole and specialised scrutiny by the Select Committee on Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Unfortunately, that does not work in this case: much of the work of the investment security unit will depend on input from intelligence and security agencies and similar sensitive sources that cannot and must not be made public.

Furthermore, on Second Reading, the then Business Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), made crystal clear how central secret material would be to the practical application of the provisions of this legislation. He stated that

“the whole point of the Bill is for it to be narrow on national security grounds”.

He also said:

“These powers are narrowly defined and will be exclusively used on national security grounds. The Government will not be able to use these powers to intervene in business transactions for broader economic or public interest reasons”.—[Official Report, 1 November 2020; Vol. 684, c. 206-210.]

It follows that the very areas in which the BEIS Committee would be perfectly qualified to scrutinise policy are specifically excluded from the application of the powers conferred by the National Security and Investment Bill.

That scrutiny gap was addressed, also on Second Reading, by the shadow Business Secretary, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who said:

“Given the sensitive nature of the issues involved in this Bill, I do think there needs to be a way…for this House to monitor how this is working in practice.

I do not speak for it, but we have a special Committee of the House—the Intelligence and Security Committee—that can look at these issues. I would like to raise the question with the Secretary of State whether it could play a role in scrutinising the working of the regime and some of the decisions being made, because there are real restrictions on the kind of transparency there can be on these issues…The ISC is in a sense purpose-built for some of these issues.”—[Official Report, 17 November 2020; Vol. 684, c. 214.]

It is hard to disagree with that, although I hasten to add that the Committee has not the slightest wish gratuitously to add to its workload, overburdened as we are due to our delayed reconstitution and the fact that we cannot operate virtually, where sensitive material is concerned, during periods of lockdown. Nevertheless, Parliament should be enabled to scrutinise the implementation of the powers given to Government by this legislation, which explicitly puts national security material at the heart of future decision making. It is obvious that there will be potential conflicts between encouraging business on the one hand and safeguarding national security on the other. In 1994, the ISC was established specifically for circumstances such as these—namely, to examine matters that Parliament could not because they were too sensitive for public disclosure and debate.

It has been suggested that the ISC cannot undertake this role this time because the organisation concerned, the new investment and security unit, is based in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, rather than Departments like the Home Office or the Cabinet Office, which traditionally handle national security matters. Yet this is fundamentally to misunderstand the legal basis under which the ISC functions.

There are two interlinked documents: the Justice and Security Act 2013 and the memorandum of understanding between the Prime Minister and the ISC for which that Act provides. The long title of the JSA makes it quite clear that it provides not only for scrutiny of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, but for

“oversight of…other activities relating to intelligence or security matters…and for connected purposes.”

Section 2(1) of the Act refers to those three intelligence agencies specifically, but section 2(2) spells out our Committee’s wider remit:

“The ISC may examine or otherwise oversee such other activities of Her Majesty’s Government in relation to intelligence or security matters as are set out in a memorandum of understanding.”

Section 2(5) explains that that MOU can be altered by agreement between the ISC and the Prime Minister. All that is required, therefore, for a Government activity in relation to intelligence or security matters to be added to the existing list in the memorandum of understanding is a simple exchange of letters between the ISC and the Prime Minister agreeing to do so.

In other words, the 2013 Act and associated memorandum were designed exactly for circumstances such as these, where evolving intelligence and security arrangements create sensitive new functions and/or new units which need Parliamentary scrutiny to be within the same circle of secrecy as the long-established Agencies. To put the matter beyond all doubt, consider finally this extract from paragraph 8 of the MOU about our remit:

“The ISC is the only committee of Parliament that has regular access to protectively marked information that is sensitive for national security reasons: this means that only the ISC is in a position to scrutinise effectively the work of the Agencies and of those parts of departments whose work is directly concerned with intelligence and security matters.”

Inserted at the end of this sentence is a notation for the following footnote which explains:

“This will not affect the wider scrutiny of departments such as the Home Office, FCO and MOD by other parliamentary committees. The ISC will aim to avoid any unnecessary duplication with the work of those Committees.”

Indeed, having chaired the Commons Defence Committee in the previous two Parliaments, I can confirm there was never the slightest friction, overlap or intrusion from the then ISC into the work of the Defence Committee. The ISC looked at defence intelligence and offensive cyber, as set out in its MOU, and the Defence Committee continued to scrutinise everything else.

It really should not be necessary, every time a new unit is set up inside a Department not normally associated with national security or intelligence issues, to spell out in black and white, as I have done today, how and why the framers of the 2013 Act deliberately created the flexible memorandum of understanding arrangement that incorporated its role on the face of that legislation. It was, of course, to deal with exactly the sort of situation facing us today, where the intelligence and security battle in what is increasingly known as the grey zone of conflict mutates and moves into areas of responsibility far beyond traditional boundaries, as Deborah Haynes’ admirable new podcast illustrates so convincingly. That is why Business Ministers, rather than Defence or Security Ministers, are having to grapple with today’s legislation.

Following a constructive discussion with my hon. Friend the Minister yesterday, I was cautiously optimistic that the Government would recognise that the 2013 arrangements provide the correct basis for scrutiny on which to proceed. Of the 14 amendments tabled for today, there is one—new clause 7—that recognises the scrutiny gap in this legislation and proposes that a special report containing the relevant classified national security material should be prepared for, and provided to, the Intelligence and Security Committee. This Opposition amendment has much to commend it, and, as ISC Chairman, I would be minded to support it if it were the only available option. However, an undertaking by the Minister today that the Government will bring forward their own amendment in the upper House to close the scrutiny gap satisfactorily in a more streamlined way would be even better.

In his appearance before the Public Bill Committee, former chief of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove had the following exchange with the Minister, who referred to the annual report to be prepared for Parliament as a requirement of this legislation. The Minister asked:

“What is your view on balancing transparency and ensuring Government can take national security decisions sensitively? Where does that balance lie in terms of our ability to be as transparent as we can without harming sensitivities around these decisions?”

Sir Richard replied:

“My view would be that the annual report has as much transparency as possible, but you are probably going to require a secret annexe from time to time.”––[Official Report, National Security and Investment Public Bill Committee, 24 November 2020; c. 21.]

Whether we go down that route of a classified unpublished annexe to send to our Committee or follow the model used in the ISC’s own reports, which are prepared in full with subsequent redactions made and marked in the main body of the text, such an approach would be the least burdensome for the Department to prepare and for the ISC to scrutinise. Either method would effectively close the scrutiny gap and get this valuable and necessary legislation off to the best possible start.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure, as always, to follow the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), and I support many of his remarks.

Let me start by saying that the Opposition’s approach to this Bill is one of constructive support. That should not surprise the Minister: already at Committee stage we tabled nearly 30 targeted amendments and half a dozen new clauses to strengthen protections of our national security, although, regrettably, the Minister did not choose to accept any of them. As the Minister is also responsible for vaccine roll-out, he may have been distracted. I want to thank everybody—all the members of the Committee and the House staff involved in the Committee stage of the Bill—and confirm that we intend to continue that constructive support.

We support the Bill, because it is a Bill demanded by Labour. The problems it tackles are ones that have been highlighted by Labour, and the Government’s action, only after years of delay, seems to be a result of being constantly reminded by Labour. Reminded this Government have been, not least by their failures again and again. They were reminded in 2012, when they let the Centre for Integrated Photonics, a prize British research and development centre, be taken over by Huawei, an event that our recent head of the National Cyber Security Centre said we would not want to happen with hindsight: national security outsourced and British interests relinquished to the market.

The Government were reminded again in 2014 when they let our foremost artificial intelligence firm, DeepMind, be acquired prematurely by Google: national security interests outsourced again on account of blind market faith. They were reminded twice this time when the Government let our world-leading semiconductor firm Arm be taken over first by SoftBank and now by Nvidia. Again, an intelligence expert told our Committee that the UK had limited freedom of choice in this key strategic technology and that the deal undermined our own ability: our national interest outsourced yet again by Ministers prioritising market zeal over British security.

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On top of that, new clause 7 would create additional reporting requirements to the Intelligence and Security Committee. While I very much understand the grounds for seeking such reporting, and I was grateful for the discussion with the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East, the Government are unable to accept this amendment. I wish instead to welcome and encourage the ISC’s security-specific expertise and its review of the annual report when it is laid before Parliament. Indeed, there is no restriction on the Secretary of State providing further information in the annual report, should it be appropriate, to the ISC.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

For the sake of clarity, the annual report that will be supplied to Parliament will not have any security-sensitive information in it. The Minister says that we could request further information. The only information we want to request is the information of a security-sensitive nature that will routinely have played a part in leading to these decisions. I do not want to tell any tales out of school. All I can say is that the Minister seemed very receptive when I put forward the idea of an annexe to the report, which would come to the Committee, or alternatively there could be an unredacted or redacted version of the report. Is he saying that the Cabinet Office is declining to do that? If so, it would appear that the malign influence of one Mr Cummings is not entirely eliminated from that Department.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s intervention. What I was saying is that there are no restrictions. His Committee will be able to invite the Secretary of State to give evidence to it, and it will also be able to ask for further information, which the unit will be able to provide.

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[Dr Lewis]

Is this what the Minister wants? Every year, the Committee will request to have a comprehensive explanation of the security sensitive information that has underlain the different decisions that the unit has taken. All he is saying is that we can request this ad hoc every year and we will get it—I will believe that when I see it. If that were to be the case, there could be no possible objection to incorporating this in the legislation now so that it is not at the whim of a future Minister to either give us what we need or deny us what we need.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his intervention and his powerful argument, but I just repeat that there are no restrictions on his Committee requesting that information.

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[Dr Julian Lewis]

Mr Deputy Speaker, may I begin this short contribution by warmly endorsing what you had to say by way of congratulations to the new Secretary of State? He is genuinely one of the most popular Members in any part of the House, and I am sure that his delayed but nevertheless entirely merited accession to the Cabinet was greeted with wide acclamation.

The best must never be allowed to be the enemy of the good. This is a good Bill, but there are, as the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) said, opportunities for it to be improved further in another place, which I hope will happen. It is never good form to repeat from the lengthier preliminary stages what one has said in any detail in the final Third Reading debate, so I will just quote one small extract from the memorandum of understanding between the Prime Minister and the ISC, which the Secretary of State may not have heard me read earlier. Paragraph 8 of the memorandum of understanding says:

“only the ISC is in a position to scrutinise effectively the work of the Agencies and of those parts of Departments”—

meaning other Departments such as his—

“whose work is directly concerned with intelligence and security matters.”

On Report, the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), said that it will be open to the ISC to request the secret information that cannot be published. That is a great step forward, and I thank him for it genuinely, because previously there were remarks to the effect that the ISC’s writ did not run anywhere near the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. That appears to have been dropped, and that is a big step forward.

The reason why it is necessary to recognise this is not that we want to make extra work for ourselves. It is because we entirely agree with the Government that the security threats constantly change, morph and spread themselves out into different areas of activity and, inevitably therefore, into different areas for which different Departments have responsibility. We cannot possibly do our job of inspecting and scrutinising those parts of security issue information that have to be classified if we are not allowed to go into those Departments only in so far as that type of information has spread with a new threat into a different Department. If the Government are saying—and I see some nodding heads on the Front Bench—that it is now accepted that the ISC can ask the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy for this sort of information, that is a huge step forward, and we thank the Government for it. We still believe that it would be better for it to be formalised in the way that Sir Richard Dearlove suggested in Committee.

I will conclude with a message that I would like the Ministers to take to their colleagues in the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office seems to have a strange sort of fear of the Intelligence and Security Committee, because every time we try to do our job, it seems to want to push back. The message I wish to give to them is this: “Friends, colleagues—comrades, even—of the Cabinet Office, the ISC is not your enemy. We are your constructively critical friends. You know what? Sometimes we get it right: we got it right over Huawei. It would have been good if successive Governments had listened a bit earlier over Huawei, but they got there in the end. If you lock us out, you are simply shutting off a safety valve and a mechanism for correcting mistakes that you need not make. Don’t make that mistake again. Apart from that, congratulations on a very good Bill indeed.”