Care Bill [HL]

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I rise because I gave an assurance to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, that I would speak on this amendment as I have form, as they say, in this area.

Ten or so years ago, when one person accused me of being rather like Vlad the Impaler and we were slaughtering, as well as merging, a number of quangos, two of the candidates for merger were the Human Tissue Authority and the HFEA. Much of the argument for doing that was very similar to the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Patel, has advanced, although I did not know as much then as I know now about the number of bodies that we had compared with other countries regulating in this area. However, I assure the Committee that we had a lot more in 2003-04. Therefore, there is a case for this merger, and it has been made.

By backing away from this merger in the face of the arguments that were put forward, I ceased to be Vlad the Impaler and became Warner the Wimp. To their credit, this Government decided to have another go, but they seemed to get themselves in roughly the same position as Warner the Wimp and withdrew. Really, they withdrew because at the end of the day the savings were—certainly so far as I was concerned—not significant compared with some of the other savings that could be made. However, we have grown to appreciate more the importance of health research and the role of the life sciences in our economy, and I think that there is still a case for going the extra mile, when you can, to streamline the regulatory system in this area.

I hope that the Government will look sympathetically on this amendment, even if they do not want to accept it in its present form. I hope that some of us speaking out on this in the review will give the Government some courage to be a bit braver than they were, and than I was, in the past. Therefore, I support the spirit and the ideas behind this amendment.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I fear that I have to support the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on this amendment, even though I do not think it goes far enough. In my view, the case for having a Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority at all is now quite dubious. It is 20 years or more since this treatment was established. There is no longer public anxiety about it, as there was in 1990, when the Act was introduced. It is now a regular treatment. As long as this treatment is licensed in this way, it will look like a maverick treatment to people—something extra, outside the health service.

One issue is that, sadly, these treatments are affordable only in private practice. Of course, the health service has done a good deal towards trying to supply them, but as the noble Earl knows, there are many examples where people pay very large sums in the private sector for these treatments and they are not and cannot be regulated. If one was really going to be serious about regulating in vitro fertilisation, the first thing that would be needed to prevent couples being exploited would be to find a way to reduce the massive burden of cost, which is out of proportion to the actual expense of the treatment. That is really something that needs to be looked at.

Sadly, the HFEA has not performed particularly well in the areas of research. I would like to recount briefly as an example the last licensed inspection of my own laboratory where we conduct experiments on embryos where there is no possibility of those embryos being transferred to a human patient. They are of course effectively dying in culture. It is extraordinary how stringent the last inspection was with regard to the quality of our laboratory. Why our laboratory should be seen to be more up to a particular standard than others doing cell culture work was beyond my comprehension given the fact that these cells, under no circumstances, could be used for human treatment: they were simply to investigate a phenomenon.

I could not help wondering whether in fact that particular inspection committee was being vituperative, because it had heard me speak against the HFEA at a previous debate in the House of Lords. I have no idea about that. But certainly, given that the previous year we had had a gold standard approval for our methods, I have to say that the inspection process is a patchy one. The problem really is that, currently, the HFEA licenses treatments that are practically research procedures that have not been validated and which are being charged to patients.

There are many examples of anomalies that are worrying. The noble Earl may have seen this week a full-page advertisement for egg sharing at a London private clinic. Incidentally, that clinic has been run by a member of the HFEA. One cannot help but feel that this is a shocking conflict of interest given that egg sharing is somewhat difficult to justify in certain circumstances as poor women may be persuaded to give their eggs under situations that are perhaps not ideal for them. They may in fact end up with someone else getting treatment at their mental expense—not their physical expense because they get a free treatment—and then 20 years later finding a child they do not even know about trying to trace them because of the information shown on our birth certificates. That anomaly has never been worked out.

I am really very surprised, too, that no serious attempt has been made to bar clinics that seek to send patients overseas for treatments that are not allowed in this country. There are many examples where patients are sent for various treatments where they might receive more than two embryos at a treatment, which would be against the regulations in this country, but they can come back and give birth to their triplets on the National Health Service. Clearly, that is an anomaly.

While I have absolutely no axe to grind about good private practice, there is no question that sometimes there are issues where clinics advertise wares that are unjustified. That happened two weeks ago when a clinic announced that it now had a treatment that could improve the success rate threefold. Of course, if I as a medical practitioner said that to the press, I could be held in front of the General Medical Council for advertising. But a clinic can get away with that kind of approach if it is not actually being mentioned by a medical practitioner.

The real reason for wanting to see at least some slimming down—we may need to come back to this at the Report stage to see exactly what clauses would be eliminated; it is difficult to see the whole of this rather large amendment now—is that at some stage in the near future we should revisit the Act of Parliament to see what would be best for purpose. In the mean time, however, there is a great deal of force in agreeing to slim down the number of regulatory authorities. As everyone across the House knows, regenerative medicine is one of the great opportunities for British medicine. At the moment, one may have to apply to up to 10 different regulatory authorities to get full licensing for the sorts of procedures one might want to follow for research, particularly where animal research may have to be done in parallel. That seems to be a very inhibitory process and there is evidence that it is preventing many bright people going into this research. They need to launch their PhD projects in other ways as quickly as possible.

While the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, is not perfect, slimming it down like this is a good start and an opportunity. I am also delighted to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Willis, who would have moved this amendment with the noble Lord, Lord Patel, is on the mend. That is good news about an outstanding parliamentarian. If the amendment were to be pressed, I would wish to vote for it.