European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 12th March 2018 Lords Chamber

I strongly support the view that clinical trials are an absolutely essential aspect of our life. From time to time I have been involved in seeing just how complicated they are. One of the bureaucratic difficulties is that if you have a number of clinical trials in different hospitals for the same matter you have to get the consent of the ethics committee in each one. They all have an ego of their own so getting agreement is not always easy. The proposal which the EU has adopted, and which will come into effect in due course, is an extremely important step forward. I would like to see the power to implement and use it being adopted in the Bill. I suggest, as a possibility, that the Minister should have discretion to adopt such measures of EU law which are agreed to but not yet in force. This deals with a point debated earlier at the instance of my noble friend.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I will add a brief note of agreement with the amendment, for the obvious reason that this country’s pharmaceutical industry is our most important and must be involved in drug trials. I have seen this myself, having been involved with various clinical trials in the past. These have been of benefit to British patients and, subsequently, to our economy.

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

My Lords, I have a tentative question. If it is true that we do not trust our own legal environment with medical research in which, as has been said, we have great expertise, why should we trust ourselves with anything else? Across the whole of the Bill, responsibility is being transferred to this country. Why should we not be able to do that for medical research as much as for anything else?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Goldie]

I think these businesses understand the very real and practical challenges that confront the Government in the unprecedented complexity of a process to leave the EU: that is, when we leave, we will not be part of the body of EU member states nor its regimes, agencies and institutions. However, there is no reason to imagine that in the UK post Brexit we will not continue to be at the forefront of the life sciences or that we will not have the most excellent regime of clinical trials regulatory structures. These will fall within our control.

[Lord Winston]

I am increasingly puzzled by this conversation. If you are doing a clinical trial, you have to harmonise all the arms of that trial for it to be randomly and properly assessed and for its statistics to be valid. Is the noble Baroness suggesting that we do our own small trials, irrespective of what is going on in a much larger pool of people? Does she not understand that, given the genetic diversity of the European population, the more people who are involved in the same trial, the more relevant the answers to the trial are, particularly in cases such as cancer, where they are all under the same rules?

[Baroness Goldie]

I am not in any way diminishing the important point that the noble Lord makes. I am pointing out that there are many types of clinical trials—for example, at the moment we are engaged in partnerships with non-EU countries. However, the Prime Minister has made it clear that we desire to have the closest possible relationship with the EU. We think that the systems we have been engaged in around clinical trials have been very strong, good and important.