Trade Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 1st October 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and my noble friend Lord Patel have very eloquently spoken to these amendments. They are incredibly important, and I strongly support them. We have to protect the NHS and publicly funded healthcare services across the UK from any control from outside the UK. To do otherwise would cost us dearly and would, in the end, prevent us looking after our own, because we would be told what to do from outside.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has shown, all aspects of the NHS and social care must be protected from trade agreements at every level. We need to maintain the option of reversing the privatisation which has already occurred, if that is what we decide to do in the future, and we must be free to create collaborative health and social care. Trade agreements must not drive us into some kind of locked-in increased privatisation of the NHS or, indeed, force any such change in the devolved nations. The health and social care sectors must be excluded from the scope of all future trade agreements, otherwise we will find that the NHS is irretrievably undermined.

On maintaining quality, we are world leaders in pharmaceutical research and development, yet access does not always match innovation. The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry has pointed out that in the first year of a new medicine being launched, only one-fifth of eligible patients in the UK get access compared to those in France and Germany. Our ability to regulate and maintain the quality and safety of medicines and medical devices must not be undermined by some small sub-paragraph in a trade agreement that slips by almost unnoticed.

In addition, medicines and medical devices must remain affordable in the UK. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society highlighted the huge extra cost to the NHS after Essential Pharma disclosed plans to cease production of Priadel, its cheapest lithium carbonate product, due to restrictions on permitted pricing. The suggested alternatives for bipolar disorder owned by the same company can cost at least 10 times as much.

So this is not only about who runs the NHS today. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, our NHS databases are extremely valuable. They are a resource for our future research and development and, from that, for our future economic development. If we lose them through a trade agreement, we will irretrievably damage our future economic development.

I now turn briefly to Amendment 75, which ensures that the Government can uphold the right of citizens to access medicines under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as part of the right to the highest attainable standard of healthcare. Modern free trade agreements are used increasingly as vehicles to further pharmaceutical industry interests ahead of public health needs. They increasingly include clauses on intellectual property, pharmaceutical regulatory processes and investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms that affect price and decrease access to medicines. To secure affordable access to medicines, the Government must be able to grant compulsory licences, deal with exhausted intellectual property rights, strengthen patentability criteria and determine what constitutes a national emergency, as laid out in subsection (3) of the proposed new clause. The Covid pandemic has shown why we must always be able to make technologies available quickly, widely and at the lowest cost. As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, pointed out, generics are not always cheaper in a complex market that can easily be manipulated.

Our NHS database is extremely valuable, and its value is increasing. It cannot be thrown away. There are times when short-term industry profits are not good for patients and delay access to affordable medicines and health technologies. These amendments aim to secure our healthcare for the future. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Fox, that informed patient consent requires a patient to know whether data is held, what it is used for and how it can be manipulated, even when it is anonymised. They would rightly be outraged if that data is allowed to put profits in the pockets of other countries, knowing that it will never be ploughed back into the NHS—certainly not at 100%.

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will intervene only briefly, initially to support my noble friend Lord Bassam in some of the examples he gave. Dispute settlement in trade deals is pretty important as is what is put into the deal. I am not clear about—but I hope I am—whether “public services” includes critical infrastructure. As far as I am concerned, the two go together. I would cite energy, for a start, because one can see the problems we are going to have with energy in this country with the collapse of the nuclear deal. We must have a mix. There is a good chance that the lights and the gas may go out and the Government may want to move at some point to take monopoly control of the service. They ought to be able to do that, but there are too many sticky fingers for my liking in the issues involved and therefore I think the idea behind the amendment by my noble friend Lord Bassam is very good.

I want to make a brief point about Amendment 51 on the health service. I thought the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, was devastating with its list of companies. Do not get me wrong, I have no objection to the NHS or other public services using the best available management tools, techniques and individuals to provide services but making use of them is not the same as handing over ownership. That is where one has to draw the line. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, made a very fair point. The public do not care who is providing the service as long as it is there when they need it, free at the point of use. He went on to say that they will care when their taxes go up. That point is when someone, such as the Prime Minister, will say, “You can avoid that by buying some insurance.” It is the slippery road to push us down the insurance route. I know we are all nice people in the Lords but frankly I do not trust the Prime Minister.

[Baroness Northover (LD) [V]]

My Lords, many of the debates here take me back to 2012, and I look forward to the contribution from my former boss, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. I want to speak in support of Amendment 75 in the name of my noble friend Lady Sheehan. She has laid the amendment out effectively and comprehensively. There has long been tension between those marketing and those purchasing proprietary medicines and generics. Clearly, where pharmaceutical companies invest in research and development they should be rewarded for that, but we also know how expert the industry is at claiming R&D when that is beyond what they have actually done.

This issue plays out in the NHS but also internationally, particularly in developing countries where basic medicines may not be affordable and dependence on generics is vital. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, the pandemic has shown how important this is. It reinforces that we are all interlinked. An infection that affects the community in one part of the world is within days potentially spread worldwide. It is in all our interests that disease is countered everywhere, as well as that being the right thing to do.

As my noble friend Lady Sheehan said, Amendment 75 affirms the Government’s right to use internationally agreed safeguards to protect public health, including securing access to more affordable generic medicines. As she said, earlier FTAs often focused on tariffs and trade in goods, while in the past couple of decades FTAs have become more comprehensive. Of course, many such developments are welcome in terms of ensuring standards, as we have been discussing, but provisions can also inappropriately protect monopolistic business. As I have said, genuinely innovative companies have a case, but their role can be exploited. In recognition of this, the WTO’s TRIPS agreement included public health safeguards. These were reaffirmed in the 2001 Doha declaration. Protecting genuine innovation has therefore already been addressed by the WTO, and it is important that these proposals are taken forward. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.