European Medicines Agency

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) for securing this important and timely debate. I am aware of how important academic and medical research is to his constituents and his constituency. I am also aware of the standing that the work done in Cambridge gives to the United Kingdom on a global stage. Given our current state of political uncertainty, I thank him for all the work he is doing in this area.

Some hon. Members will know that I worked as a biochemist in the National Health Service for 33 years before being elected to serve as the MP for Heywood and Middleton. Medical research and innovation have been at the very heart of my professional career, working and collaborating with others from across the world here in the UK to focus on improving the quality of patient care. Like other hon. Members, I respect and will uphold the decision of the referendum on 23 June that the British public wish to leave the European Union, but I will continue to argue that our leaving does not mean isolation from the European Union.

We must not become isolated from world-leading medical and academic research or from collaborative innovation on life-saving medicines. We must reject isolation from funding and economic prosperity. We must ensure we are not isolated from regulatory safeguards or from providing our citizens and patients with the best quality of life and healthcare. Isolation in medical terminology denotes a hospital or ward for patients with contagious or infectious diseases. We should not isolate or quarantine ourselves and become, in effect, the sick man of Europe. Keeping institutions such as the European Medicines Agency is key to the future of British science and medicine, and to accelerated access to treatments for patients in the UK.

As a representative of a north-west England constituency, I know just how important the pharmaceutical industry is, not only in providing life-saving drugs, but in providing high-skilled training and jobs. Greater Manchester has the most pharmaceutical employees of any region with just over 6,000 workers, totalling 18% of the total jobs in this industry across the UK. The pharmaceutical market in the EU as a whole employs 700,000 people. Every job in the pharmaceutical industry creates three to four more jobs through indirect employment.

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on medical research, I know how imperative enabling timely patient access to new medicines is and how it plays a vital role in supporting the development of medicines for the benefit of patients, based on a comprehensive scientific evaluation of data and procedural clinical testing. The EMA does that by developing guidelines and setting standards, while co-ordinating the rigorous monitoring of pharmaceutical companies’ compliance with their pharmacovigilance obligations. It provides comprehensive information for the public on the safety of medicines and co-operates extensively with external parties—in particular, representatives of patients and healthcare professionals. The proposed great repeal Bill should ensure that all those aspects are preserved in UK law and harmonised with EU legislation and directives. Let us take, for example, Cancer Research UK, which directly funds more than 200 clinical trials, 28% of which involve at least one other EU country. Any change to EU legislation would put those pan-EU trials at risk.

The EMA has achieved notable and substantial advancements in its field, recommending approximately 1,000 medicines to the European Commission for a marketing authorisation for all EU member states. Those medicines benefit patients suffering from all types of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, neurological disorders, infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders. The EMA has also excelled in specialised areas such as medicines for rare diseases, medicines for children and advanced-therapy medicines. It has built a broad access to clinical data, allowing shared knowledge to be applied in future research, and has thus increased the efficiency of the development of medicines.

Of course, behind all those achievements are people. We have a duty to give reassurance immediately to the staff of the EMA. Of its 890 employees, 93% were born outside the UK. We must clarify that they will be able to continue to live and work in the UK; indeed, we must strive to end the uncertainty that so many of these workers are feeling at the moment. Although the complexities of this matter and the wider issues that this debate raises cannot be confined to a soundbite or a sentence, some of the language and tone on immigration during the past few weeks has been regrettably toxic. The French microbiologist Louis Pasteur said: “Science knows no country”. In that spirit, I advocate the positives of not only immigration, but innovation. The two are inherently intertwined in the scientific and healthcare community.

Only last week, two British scientists, Duncan Haldane and Sir Fraser Stoddart, collected Nobel prizes for science. I congratulate them and their teams on those awards. Both those eminent British-born scientists have worked in the UK and abroad, and each of them warned that the risk of Brexit could mean “a big negative” for British science.

We must continue to foster scientific excellence post Brexit, full stop. Retaining the EMA here in London is essential to harbouring and cementing those values. The time for speculation is over. The Government proclaim that they want “a country that works for everyone”, but if they do not stand up now and speak up for the scientific community, they will end up creating a country that stands isolated from scientific research and innovation —a country that is neither welcoming nor working.

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[David Mowat]

That is a fair point. It could be a danger. The point I was making was that they made the plea to remain in the EU from the United States, which is the leader in many aspects of science. I think we can agree that science is international—it operates in Japan, the US, the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere—and that, however we achieve Brexit, we should do what we can to avoid creating barriers to internationalisation.

[Liz McInnes]

Will the Minister give way?

[David Mowat]

Maybe we cannot agree on that. I give way to the hon. Lady.

[Liz McInnes]

There is no irony in the comments of the Nobel prize winners just because they were made by British scientists working in the United States. That fact only emphasises how international science is. We must not fall into the trap of taking the line that was spread before the referendum:—that this country has had enough of experts. Those people are experts, and we should listen to what they have to say because they are the people who know what is going on. They know what the effect on British science will be if the EMA and its principles are lost.

[David Mowat]

We can agree that the scientific principles at the core of our world-leading science must not be lost in regulation. We can also agree that science is international. It is in all our interests, and in the interests of our communities and our children, that this country continues to do world-class science as part of an international collaboration. That is the Government’s intent and will.

I will finish by talking about our world-class industry.