Brain Tumour Research

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the work of the charity sector in medical research is absolutely fundamental to national progress in this area. However, it too has been hit incredibly hard by Covid. We are having a number of dialogues with medical research sector representatives on how we can help. There will need to be a short, medium and long-term approach to getting back to where we were at the beginning of the year. How we bridge the current funding gap is a source of enormous concern to the department and the NHS. I cannot guarantee that we can necessarily embark on exactly the same framework that we envisaged at the beginning of the year, but I can reassure the noble Lord that we are very committed to the research community and we engage with it regularly on how we can help.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, several references have been made to our late and much-loved colleague Tessa Jowell, who I was proud to call a friend. Was she not prescient when in her last speech to this Chamber she said:

“I am not afraid. I am fearful that this new and important approach”—


referring to research—

“may be put into the ‘too difficult’ box”. [Official Report, 25/1/18; col. 1170]

When the Minister tells us in all sincerity that it is just too difficult to spend the £40 million that was promised, will he at least give this House an assurance that after this discussion he will take a personal and direct oversight of this matter, because it would be a great tragedy if those words of Tessa Jowell proved to be correct in the long run?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I hear the noble Lord’s words loud and clear. I reassure him that the good news is that Tessa Jowell left behind her in the Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission an incredibly effective organisation that is holding the feet of Ministers firmly to the fire —not least through my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy, who is on my case in a very big way.

I recognise that this is one of the tricky scientific challenges of our age. We have struggled to tackle adult brain tumours for a very long time. There has to be investment in the basic science around them, in the techniques, such as the very focused radiology, and in provable therapeutics that work in the field. This is not going to happen overnight, but I reassure the noble Lord that we are committed to finding a solution.