Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

In intervening in this interesting debate, I shall be very brief. I simply want the Minister to explain where the levers will be in the commissioning decisions to make sure that the principle of research that is being embedded across all the professions happens, given the multiplicity of providers and, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, clearly outlined, the relative paucity of research in primary care but an increased push for more people to be cared for in the community across all the disciplines involved. A simple example of that is the problem that we now have with antibiotic resistance. There is potential overprescribing, but much of that prescribing is going on in primary care in the management of relatively simple conditions. If those are not researched into, we miss a fantastically important opportunity.

[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.