Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar]

My Lords, I support many of the amendments in the group. I do so as a biomedical research and clinical academic, therefore benefiting from many of the opportunities that the current systems for biomedical research in the National Health Service provide.

I start by congratulating Her Majesty's Government on having included for the Secretary of State for the first time in a health Bill responsibilities to promoting research. That is hugely important, because it allows us to secure what has been achieved to date in structures and funding going forward in the National Health Service.

There are, of course, anxieties, which we have heard in this important debate, which need to be addressed. Can the noble Earl provide clarification in three areas, notwithstanding the fact that the Bill already emphasises the responsibilities of the Secretary of State for Health? First, how is it is envisaged that the funding for biomedical research will be protected when that fund moves to the NHS Commissioning Board? Secondly, how will the clinical commissioning groups be responsible for promoting research in future, how will that be supervised by the NHS Commissioning Board, and will any form of instruction or performance measure be included in the supervision that the Commissioning Board provides for clinical commissioning groups?

Finally, how, within the proposed structure of the Commissioning Board, will there be encouragement and support for academic health science centres, as they currently exist, and in the future, potentially, academic health partnerships? They provide the opportunity both to drive forward opportunities for biomedical research to improve healthcare and the health gain for our population, and to drive forward the economic opportunities that attend the biomedical sciences industry in our country. However, they also drive forward opportunities for a broader population health gain through a focus on the tripartite mission of improved clinical care, education, training and research.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate, and I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, and other noble Lords who have spoken in it very persuasively about the importance of research.

At heart, there are three particular questions that we put to the noble Earl, Lord Howe. First, how is funding for research to be protected? Secondly, how are we to ensure that strong leadership will be given from the centre? The third is the question of levers. What levers are there in this system to ensure that research is given a prominent place?

First, there can be no doubt whatsoever, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, of the direct link between research and the quality of patient care. That must be at the forefront of our consideration. Secondly, he is also right about public health. Research into public health, evidence and epidemiology is vital if we are to improve the overall health of people living in this country. Thirdly, we have the contribution that research makes to UK plc, and specifically the contribution of the pharmaceutical industry.

When I chaired the competitive taskforce with the industry some years ago, we found that out of the 100 most important branded medicines at the time, 30 had been developed in the UK. Although the UK share of global spend on pharmaceuticals was about 2 per cent, our R&D contribution, including that of the industry, was about 10 per cent. I suspect that those figures have slipped a little since that report, but there is no question that the pharmaceutical industry in particular makes a huge contribution to our economy. We cannot be complacent about that in the future.

On the question of leadership, I was fortunate to be present at the recent annual conference of the NHS Confederation. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, that, “They would say that, wouldn’t they”, when it comes to this rather foolish idea that somehow if you just leave it to them everything will be all right, but I recall a speech made by Dame Sally Davies in which she talked about the importance of research. She argued that the NHS itself has to make a greater contribution to research. This was not about funding; this was about NHS organisations recognising that research was important. It was a brilliant speech. It is essential that we continue to have that kind of national leadership in research funding.

There is a big question about what exactly the duty of the Secretary of State will be with regard to research if we end up with a highly devolved structure in which the levers left to the Secretary of State will clearly be limited. It is clear that the day-to-day concerns of most people in the NHS are going to be diverted into a market-orientated culture, where, frankly, the kind of collaboration that research requires across NHS organisations may well be regarded as collusive behaviour by economic regulators and the competition authorities.

I speak with some experience of economic regulation. Ofgem was the last economic regulator with which I had regular dealings as Minister for Energy. What struck me was that regulators’ concerns are much more about day-to-day issues than they are about the long-term viability of a particular industry. We found, with Ofgem, that we had to change the law to make sure that it had some regard to future customers rather than simply being concerned about the actual price of energy to the customers of today. If we have regulators whose main concern is about driving day-to-day competition, I wonder where issues of research come into play.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the primary duty of Monitor, as the noble Lord will have observed, is to patients. That is its overriding duty.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Yes my Lords, but so was the overriding duty of Ofgem to the customer. The problem is how a regulator defines that responsibility. Since the Government are intent on this very foolish drive into competition, I believe that the risk is that the regulator will also be driven into thinking that that is its most important aim.

There are some real questions here, which I put to the noble Earl, about ensuring that there is sufficient concern, investment and leadership on the question of research. I would also ask the noble Earl how we protect and ring-fence the research budget. I ask him to think of the national Commissioning Board, faced with a hard winter, huge public concern and political pressure about funding, and the temptation to dip into the research budget. We all know that that happens. My noble friend Lord Warner and I were debating earlier who was responsible when there was real pressure on the training commissions. I thought it was my noble friend, actually, but we can continue to debate that.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, things went downhill when I left at the end of December 2006.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, with the greatest respect, I will not go into who left me the junior hospital doctors issue. He will recall that my first day as a Minister was actually the first day of Committee on the glorious Mental Health Bill, and that was a blessed memory, I must say.

My experience was that the health service let us down on training commissions, because at the time they were facing a financial difficulty and it was all too easy to cut those commissions. The result was that Ministers essentially took it upon themselves to put central controls back into the system. My concern is that if the NCB simply has research in its budgetary responsibility and there are severe pressures, it is just too easy to dip into it. The problem is also, as my noble friend Lord Warner said, that, as we know, sometimes research budgets take a little time to kick in, but once you do it you are funding for three, five, seven years. Again, in each financial year, an amount is probably available in the winter that had not been spent. The problem is that you will never get that resource back again.

The second point that I would like to put to the noble Earl is about clinical commissioning groups. How do we ensure that their commissioning decisions support research? My noble friend Lord Turnberg said that research is no cottage industry, but clinical commissioning groups are the epitome of a cottage industry. He also referred to the fact that GPs have little history of undertaking research and commitment to it. Yet we are handing them billions and billions of pounds, quite remarkably, on the basis of no evidence whatever that I can see that they are fitted to discharge that responsibility. I ask the noble Earl where we can have assurance that clinical commissioning groups will be prepared to invest in services where there is a strong research base.

The third challenge is to NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts. The noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, put his hand on it when he talked about the reduction in the number of clinical academic posts. I believe that NHS trusts have a great role to play in encouraging their clinicians and in encouraging joint posts with universities. Again, I worry that the focus on job plans and the productivity of clinicians will discourage research because the emphasis will be on patient throughput. How are we going to ensure that that does not happen?

--- Later in debate ---

Amendment 89E, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, would remove the power of the NHS Commissioning Board, clinical commissioning groups and local authorities to conduct research in relation to their health service functions. It would leave intact the existing paragraph 13 of Schedule 1 to the NHS Act 2006, which confers the power to conduct or assist research solely on the Secretary of State. I am taking it now that the noble Lord did speak to that amendment. I confess to a measure of confusion over its intention. Currently, the Bill recognises that research and evidence-based care are needed throughout an effective health care system, a principle I would hope that all noble Lords would agree with—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I should apologise to the noble Earl. The amendment was put down to probe the issues.

[Earl Howe]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. In that case I shall not dwell on it at great length.

Amendment 40A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, and other noble Lords, would require the Secretary of State to have regard to the need to promote the use of information derived from patients for research purposes while taking full account of the confidentiality of information. I welcome the intent behind this amendment, but it is in fact unnecessary. We recognise the important role that patient data, if treated carefully and confidentially—and that I hope goes without saying—can play in improving the quality of health research. I spoke earlier about our consultation document An Information Revolution, in which we propose that the most important source of data is the patient’s or the service user’s care record generated at the point of care. Information in these records also provides much of the data needed for other secondary purposes: for commissioners, for managers, for care professionals and, importantly, for research. We are using the responses that we received to the consultation, together with the findings of the NHS Future Forum, to develop an information strategy for health and social care in England. This will highlight how increased transparency and greater access to information supports improvements in care and research. It is the major work stream. I can reassure the noble Lord that we value the use of patient information where confidentiality is appropriately protected as a source of research and that we are looking at ways to embed its use in our information strategy.