UK Manufacturing Industry

Lord Lyell Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lyell]

My Lords, I shall follow my noble friend Lord Dykes because everything I want to say is on an industry. I learnt about that industry, although it was nothing to do with my youth. It is the pharmaceutical industry, or what the Prime Minister chooses to call “life sciences”. I am probably unique in your Lordships' House in having not one O-level in science. Like my noble friend Lord Cope and, I understand, the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, I was trained as an accountant—a bean counter, though for the purposes of the pharmaceutical industry, I would call it a pill counter.

In 1977, I landed on the Benches opposite. The late Lord Belstead said to me, “You, lad, will cover the Patents Bill”. What did that involve? It involved pharmaceuticals. We call them drugs or, now, life sciences. This industry has been given a very heavy political boost this week by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister, who stressed that the United Kingdom should be a leading place for investment in this industry. However, investment is not the only side of things. The time, skills and disciplines required will take between 12 and 15 years—the scale of many of our careers in your Lordships’ House—to produce what they like to call a blockbuster, a successful product or drug. Chapter 3 of the strategy, the pamphlet that is available for O-level students like myself in the Printed Paper Office, has the excellent title of “Attracting, developing and rewarding talent” for everybody involved in this industry. I hope that we will be able to combine the scientific excellence and commercial rigour that are necessary overall in industry in the United Kingdom but particularly in pharmaceuticals and life sciences.

Secondly, I understand that there is now enormous assistance from all the records of the National Health Service throughout the United Kingdom. Indeed, in some of the pamphlets, I discovered that there are enormous records taken in my own area of Tayside of some aspects of health—I had better not go into which particular aspects; nothing to do with the liver or obesity, but we do not need to worry overmuch about that. There is certainly a huge amount of information available from National Health Service records, and I understand that using these records is going to be one of the priorities of the Government’s strategy: first, in discovering what ailments need to be cured and are a priority; secondly, to carry out trials directed towards the relevance of these problems and diseases.

Then one comes, of course, to the finance. The research and trials are fine but I am delighted to read in the pamphlet—I am afraid that I have perhaps been dozing like Rip Van Winkle with regard to some aspects of the tax thing, but I am sure that my noble friend Lord Cope will be delighted—that there is something splendid called “super-deduction relief”. I was not aware of that in my tax studies, but I understand that is going up from 200 per cent to 225 per cent. I see the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, beaming at that. Obviously there will be something in it for him, I hope, and others for whom he has spoken. It shows that the Government are taking this particularly seriously, to try to help all types of businesses, large and small, to get some financial assistance. It sounds quite a lot, that you are writing off twice your investment, but over a scale of 12 to 15 years, perhaps that is no small help.

My third point concerning the life sciences industry is that NICE is supporting both the compliance and the regulation. This is simply essential and obligatory for life sciences and medicine because one is taking care of not just finance, not just these wonderful motorcars that my noble friend Lord Dykes spoke about, but of people’s lives, well-being and health. I strongly support every aspect of NICE carrying out compliance and regulation in this industry. It is no small miracle that 20 per cent of Europe’s successful medical biotechnical companies are here in the United Kingdom. We are indeed world leaders in some aspects of this industry, as the table on page 11 of Investing in UK Health and Life Sciences shows.

I am immensely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, for giving us the chance to discuss the excellence of British industry. I am proud to be a mere accountant, a counter of those pills—they used to be beans but we call them something else.