Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and declare my interests as a member of the GMC board and as president of GS1, the barcoding organisation responsible for the Scan4Safety programme. The Bill is of great importance for patient safety, but also for the health of the life sciences sector, yet it is striking for its brevity and, as the Minister acknowledged, for the extensive powers given to Ministers without the exceptional justification required for the skeleton approach taken. The Minister said he was listening, but he will know that both the Delegated Powers Committee and the Constitution Committee were highly critical, and I believe there is a strong argument for the Bill’s powers in relation to medicine and medical devices regulation to be subject to sunset clauses.

Leaving the EU’s regulatory regime brings significant risks that companies will choose somewhere other than the UK to trial and launch medicines. At the moment we are nowhere near knowing whether our new regulatory system is to be aligned with the rest of Europe—the policy statement published yesterday by MHRA on devices and clinical trials regulation from 1 January 2021 is silent on this. I have to say to the Minister that I am not impressed that his department thinks it is acceptable for such a publication to be produced hours before our Second Reading debate. There is certainly no room for complacency. The European Medicines Agency covers 25% of global pharmaceutical sales; the UK on its own makes up just 3%. The odds are that companies will want to submit applications for new drugs to the EMA before the MHRA, meaning that the UK will lose its advantage and UK patients will risk getting slower access to the latest medicines.

As Sarepta pointed out to me, for many companies the attractiveness referred to in the Bill equates to speed of decision-making at every stage. That means being able to approve clinical trials faster than in the EU, maintaining swift decision-making on medicines approvals and getting approved medicines to patients faster. Yet the Minister will know that the NHS record in uptake of new medicines is very poor indeed, and I would like to hear from him what is going to be done to improve access for NHS patients to these new medicines.

On patient safety, Ministers are silent on whether they will accept many of the recommendations of the Cumberlege review. In particular, will the Minister support the appointment of a commissioner for patient safety, which the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, argued for very persuasively in her report?

Finally, I turn to the abhorrent practice of forced organ harvesting taking place in China today, and to the importance of ensuring that the UK is not in any way complicit in these crimes. In a letter to me last night, the Minister referred to the World Health Organization’s view that China is implementing an ethical voluntary organ transplant system. That is simply not credible, and in fact it is based on a self-assessment by China itself. A much more objective assessment comes from the China Tribunal, which concluded:

“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale.”


At the moment, human tissue and organs can be imported into the UK from countries such as China without traceability, documentation or consent. Marie Rimmer MP tabled an amendment in the Commons to deal with this. A similar amendment will be tabled here and I very much hope that the Government will agree to it.