Covid-19 Update

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The right hon. Gentleman asks a characteristically critical question and puts his finger on a vital logistical point. We are planning to help students to get home safely with the assistance of mass testing. In places such as Leeds, mass testing is being made available to the directors of public health. Of course, these things must be dovetailed. The universities will be in the lead on the mass testing of students, but this process, by its nature, will absolutely draw on the public health knowledge and expertise of the local council. Although each of us has become something of a public health expert over the past 11 months, the professional support from the public health team in the council will be critical to this task.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon Friend's announcement on the roll-out of mass testing for NHS staff and congratulate him on securing so many doses of the vaccine. It is wonderful news that the efficacy of the first of these vaccines seems to be so very high. I have read in newspapers over the past month countless pundits telling me that there would be no vaccine and that the right thing to do would be to let the virus rip and try to protect a few vulnerable people. Does this not show that it is right to listen to the scientists and the real experts rather than pundits who would have put millions of people’s lives at risk?

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend feels strongly about this point. That is understandable, because the strategy that we have pursued has been to suppress the virus while we work on the vaccine. We are not there yet, but this progress towards a vaccine demonstrates why we followed the strategy of protecting life even though we know that there are challenging consequences for businesses and other parts of society. We have done so because we have a good degree of confidence that a vaccine will come and will make a significant contribution to solving this problem without the huge risk of its impact on taking people’s lives, especially the most vulnerable, that would be incurred if we did not suppress the virus.

Covid-19 Update

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Yes. We put an extra £10 million into the local authorities in the north-east to support contact tracing and we are also stitching together the data feeds between the national system and each of the individual local authorities in the north-east. We will keep working hard on that project. I will keep listening to the needs of the local authorities in the north-east and across the rest of the country.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

It is good that we are now testing more than other countries and good that we have a quarter more testing capacity than we had in August, and we are very grateful to the staff of the mobile testing centres that we now have in Oadby and Wigston, but what is my right hon. Friend doing to further drive up testing capacity so that we can stay ahead of this?

[Matt Hancock]

That is the subject of a huge amount of Government effort, working with the NHS and with the private sector on both the current technology and the new technology. I will just make a point about Oadby and Wigston in my hon. Friend’s constituency. People say, “Where is a local lockdown having an effect?” Well, the answer is in Oadby and Wigston, where the case rate has come down because the good people of Oadby and Wigston have followed the locally applied rules and that has brought the virus back under control. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for the leadership that he has shown there, along with the leaders of the county council and of the district council, who have worked really hard together to make this happen.

Medicines and Medical Devices Bill (First sitting)

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 8th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Jo Churchill]

As I said, I am willing to write to the Minister for Asia and the Pacific to explore this matter further, but I am afraid at this point that is all I can commit to.

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

The hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston made a hugely important and impassioned point, and I strongly support her. Will the Minister undertake to circulate her letter to members of the Committee?

[Jo Churchill]

Yes, of course, I will be happy to inform the Committee when I write to the Minister for Asia and the Pacific, if hon. Members would find that helpful. We heard from the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston, and I am sure we all read the pack she sent at the weekend about the trade in human organs, which is truly heinous.

Covid-19

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Of course, volunteers have a huge role to play in doing jobs that work for their skillset, but an incredibly high set of skills are needed to support some people—for instance, the people with disabilities that the hon. Member mentions. Supporting those people to get the social care they need is a critical part of our response to this virus.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

What steps are the Government taking to increase the availability of high-quality masks and other protective equipment for NHS workers?

[Matt Hancock]

We are distributing personal protective equipment across the NHS from the stockpiles and supplies that we have in place for this purpose, but we are also seeking to enhance the production of these items because it is clear that we are going to need a lot.

Coronavirus

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am working very closely with the Work and Pensions Secretary to address this exact point.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

Over the weekend, Leicestershire had its first confirmed case of coronavirus, while a number of European countries moved to ban large public events. Will the Secretary of State explain why the timing of such social distancing measures is so crucial, and at what point and on what basis he will decide if they are necessary?

[Matt Hancock]

The first question we must ask is, “How effective is this measure—is it effective?”, and the second is, “Are we going to get unintended consequences from people acting differently in a way that actually hinders the overall effort?” It is for the scientists best to explain the reason why they have scientifically come to this advice. But it is clear that there are other measures that we can take that are more effective and have fewer negative side-effects.

The National Health Service

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

I thank Ministers and everybody at University Hospitals of Leicester for the role they played in securing the fantastic £450 million investment in our local hospitals that was announced the other day. I also thank Ministers for the role they have played in today’s announcement that there will be a new £46 million investment in an urgent care hub at Kettering General. That means that constituents at both ends of my constituency will benefit from huge new investments. I am incredibly grateful.

Those are not the only pieces of good news my constituency has had recently. We have the gleaming new treatment centre at St Luke’s in Market Harborough. We have had the wonderful news that we will be keeping the world-leading children’s heart unit at Glenfield—a service that is not just brilliant for everybody in this country, but through the charity Healing Little Hearts provides help for people across the entire world. We also have the futuristic new A&E at Leicester Royal Infirmary. Those things are all great, but the investment we are about to receive will be even more transformational.

The Secretary of State came to the Royal Infirmary the other day. As we walked around, we heard about both the challenges and the opportunities that we have locally. We saw the difficulty of working in maternity when it is split across two sites. When my son was born just two weeks ago, I saw how having two different sites meant that the staff had to work all day without breaks to fit us in. Their lives and patients’ lives will be much better when we have a single new maternity hospital. As we walked around with the Secretary of State, we saw the brilliance of our intensive care staff, but we also saw that they were working in fundamentally out-of-date facilities. We saw the brilliant work that the A&E team were doing, particularly in enhancing data to improve services, but we also saw the incredible growth in demand for those services.

The investment we are about to get means a new maternity hospital, a new children’s hospital, two super-intensive care units with 100 beds in total and a planned new major treatment centre at Glenfield Hospital, as well as modernised wards, new operating theatres, new imaging facilities and, brilliantly, new additional car parking. Anybody who has ever tried to park at Leicester Royal Infirmary will realise that that is a huge boon. These local improvements are part of a wider series of improvements we are making across the NHS. It is great that we now have a long-term plan for the NHS, with a long-term budget for the NHS that allows NHS managers and staff to plan for the future.

[Jim Shannon]

I very much welcome the Government’s commitment and the money they have set aside, but is the hon. Gentleman aware that 16 million people in England live with the pain of a musculoskeletal condition? How will the Government ensure that people with arthritis are able to access the interventions that need to be in place—from joint replacement operations to physiotherapy—in a timely fashion? I think there is an opportunity to address those issues. I have the same problems in my constituency, but it is a devolved matter. I have been made aware of this issue in England. Does he agree that it is time for that?

[Neil O’Brien]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and I was about to come on to it. It is great that we are making record investment in services such as mental health and spending more than we did before. It is great that we are introducing new targets, such as basic standards for help with eating disorders. It is great that we have more doctors, more nurses and more money. However, we are conscious, as we speak to people in the NHS, that unless we can deal with the sources of demand, fundamentally we will never be able to spend enough on all the priorities, including musculoskeletal services.

What do we need to tackle those causes of demand? We of course need the long-term plan for social care. The Minister needs to stick to his guns on public health: the sugar tax has worked. Things like the campaign against the anti-vaxxers and their pseudo-science are incredibly important, as is action on preventive social care. We should keep going with things such as the migrant health charge, which is raising money for the NHS; we could increase it. We should keep going on technology. It is so important for Ministers to help GPs to upgrade their telephone triage facilities, which would make the experience of using primary care so much better and reduce the burden.

Some of the things in the Queen’s Speech are incredibly important to help deal with these growing burdens. We need new technologies, which is why it is important to get more clinical trials going more quickly. That is why I welcome the measures in the Queen’s Speech. This is about building on the life sciences review—the Bell review—and it is very important to build on the work that the academic health science networks are doing. The potential advantage of our NHS is that it should be one of the best places in the world to do clinical trials—we have the scale—but at the moment there are too many gatekeepers and too many things stopping them.

Last but not least, there is the wonderful improvement in the NHS safety body that we are creating. From personal experience, I can say that when my daughter was born some things went wrong. We had a wonderful junior registrar who did lots of things right, but a few things went wrong, and my wife gave birth without anaesthetic. After that, unfortunately, her placenta did not deliver and the consultant—we never found out who this was—removed the placenta manually with no anaesthetic, and it was incredibly painful for my wife.

It is important, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said, that we learn lessons in the NHS without attributing blame. Not attributing blame was one of the fundamental recommendations following the Mid Staffs inquiry: we have got to be able to learn lessons. When we started to complain about what happened to my wife, people closed ranks. My wife is a doctor, and we would never in a million years have sued the NHS, but they did not know that. We never even found out who the consultant was who had got things wrong, so I do not know whether the lessons were learned from that mistake; I hope they were.

Having a no-blame culture, having this new body and learning from the experiences of painful things such as the Bawa-Garba case are the ways in which we can have truth and reconciliation, with a system that learns. One of the most important things we could ever do to improve the NHS is to make it a self-improving system that is constantly learning and constantly getting better.

The National Health Service

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is what happens when privatisation and outsourcing go wrong: workers are worse off. We should bring an end to it.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

rose—

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I am going to make some progress.

We need clarification from the Secretary of State on whether he will exempt all NHS staff and all care staff from the shortage occupation list in the immigration Bill.

Safe care also depends on safe facilities, but after years of cuts in capital budgets, hospitals are crumbling and equipment is out of date.

[Neil O’Brien]

rose—

[Vicky Ford]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

In a few moments.

The repair bill facing the NHS has now risen to £6.5 billion, more than half of which relates to what is considered to be serious risk. NHS capital investment has fallen by 17% per healthcare worker since 2010. Across the NHS, the estate relies on old, outdated equipment, which is having an effect on, for instance, diagnostics. The number of patients waiting longer than six weeks for diagnostic tests and scans has increased from 3,500 under Labour to more than 43,000 under this Government.

[Neil O’Brien]

rose—

[Vicky Ford]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I will give way in a few moments.

Even if the Secretary of State replaces all the MRI scanners that are more than 10 years old—he has adopted our policy on that—we will still be struggling with the lowest numbers of MRI and CT scanners per head of population in Europe. Is it not time for a proper strategic health review?

[Neil O’Brien]

rose—

[Vicky Ford]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

In a few moments.

The Secretary of State will say that he has announced plans for six new hospital reconfigurations and seed funding for other acute trusts to prepare bids, but there is no guarantee that that funding is in place and that the Department will give trusts the go- ahead. “Seed funding” is a curious phrase. Can the Secretary of State confirm that there will be no role for private capital in that seed funding? In their 2017 manifesto, the Government promised £3 billion of capital funding from the private sector. Does that still hold? They claim to have abandoned the private finance initiative. We need clarity today.

[Neil O’Brien]

rose—

[Vicky Ford]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Ashworth]

In a few moments.

The Tory candidate for Canterbury, one Anna Firth, helpfully explained that the Prime Minister had “clearly made a mistake”. After all,

“He can’t be on top of every little detail”.

We are talking about the £450 million rebuilding of a hospital.

[Neil O’Brien]

On the subject of £450 million investments, I wonder whether we could have a moment of cross-party positivity, and whether the hon. Gentleman welcomes the £450 million investment in the hospital from which both his constituents and mine will benefit. It is a transformative investment, and we are doing it without PFI. I am sure he agrees that that is wonderful news.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Of course I welcome that £450 million. [Interruption.] It just shows what an effective Member of Parliament for Leicester South I am.

I know that the Secretary of State gets very excitable about this Leicester point, rather like a semi-house-trained pet rabbit. Let me tell him about Leicester. I did not see him on “Question Time” in Oadby the other evening—I do not often watch “Question Time”. I do not want to be disorderly, so I shall be careful about how I read out the transcript. The audience started shouting—well, it is unparliamentary, but essentially they started shouting that the Secretary of State was not being entirely truthful in what he was saying. I do not want to fall out with him, or to be disorderly, but according to the transcript, there were “jeers” from the audience.

One audience member said that hospitals in Leicester were “falling apart”. Another said, “It’s shameful.” A third said,

“It’s not a case of throwing money at it.”

A fourth said that the Secretary of State was

“saying you will invest loads…into Leicester Royal Infirmary, what about…the General?”

What, that audience member continued, about

“the benefit in terms of beds…as a whole?”

The Secretary of State replied:

“We will do all of those things and we’ve guaranteed the money to Leicester and it’s coming in the next couple of years.”

There was then audience “laughter”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Well, the General is essentially being downgraded and I want a sustainable future for Leicester.

[Neil O’Brien]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

This will be the last intervention I take because I have to get to the end of my speech, but let me just finish this point: the Leicester General is essentially being downgraded. The only thing that remains at the Leicester General is the diabetes unit, unless the Secretary of State is moving midwifery services from St Mary’s in Melton Mowbray to Leicester and, if he is doing that, he should be clear with the right hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Sir Alan Duncan).

[Neil O’Brien]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman being generous with his time. My family used maternity services at the General just last week. We sat on a couch. My wife had not eaten for nearly 24 hours because the General does not have an all-electives list for caesarean sections. That service will be better when services come together in the new maternity hospital that is going to be built. By the way we also used St Mary’s birthing unit in Melton Mowbray. It is a brilliant midwife-led unit and we are not going to close it.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

There we go, but the only way the Leicester General has a sustainable future in their own plans—these are the plans the Secretary of State has signed off from the Leicester trust—is if that midwifery unit at St Mary’s moves to the Leicester General. I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman’s family got a poor service at the Leicester General. My daughter was born at the Leicester General as well and we got an excellent service.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

For the majority of its 71-year history, the NHS has been run under the stewardship of a Conservative Secretary of State. At this moment, it is getting the biggest funding increase and the longest funding settlement in its history, along with the reforms to make sure that everybody can get the health care that they need.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

T4. What steps is my right hon. Friend taking to improve the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer, in particular increasing the use of new technologies such as gel spacers, laser ablation and MRI in diagnosis?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Seema Kennedy)]

More than 94% of men survive prostate cancer for one year, and 86% for five years, but there is more to do. That is why last April the Prime Minister announced £75 million over five years so that 40,000 men can take part in innovative research into early diagnosis and treatment. The long-term plan sets out our commitment to speed up the path from innovation to business as usual, spreading proven new techniques and technologies faster. Safer and more precise treatments in diagnostic techniques will continue to improve prostate cancer survival.

NICE Appraisals: Rare Diseases Treatments

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I am sure hon. Members will not be surprised to hear me talk again about baby Maryam, my seven-month-old constituent with spinal muscular atrophy type 1. Without treatment, Maryam will have only a few more months to live. She is waiting for NICE to announce a decision to allow access to Spinraza, the drug that she and other babies with the condition so desperately need.

I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) for securing this important debate; the Daily Mirror, especially Pippa Crerar, for telling the stories of SMA families; the Newham Recorder, the campaigning newspaper, for its continued coverage and encouragement; and the amazing members of the local community in West Ham for their support. Councillor Mas Patel has been brilliant, as has Kevin White and many others who have taken the plight of this little baby into their hearts.

Most of all, I pay tribute to Shakil, Maryam’s father, and all Maryam’s family who have steadfastly campaigned despite knowing that, when we finally get access to Spinraza in England, it could so easily be too late for Maryam.

As we know, SMA1 is an awful disease. It is a progressive muscle-wasting condition, and for a baby it causes difficulties with breathing, swallowing and gaining weight. Babies with SMA1 may not even be able to cry aloud. Spinraza is an effective treatment for SMA. With this treatment, babies and children are living longer; they are even crawling and walking. I am told that by last August, when NICE first met to consider funding Spinraza on the NHS, none of the babies who had been treated with it in the UK had died as a direct result of their SMA. The drug was so effective that the trials stopped early, yet NICE refused to approve Spinraza at that August meeting, or at the second meeting in October or in November.

In November, the expanded access programme, which allowed treatment with Spinraza while negotiations were ongoing, was closed—Biogen, the drug company that developed Spinraza, closed it. So when Maryam was diagnosed in December last year, she had no access to this drug. Even if it could have been afforded privately and even if my community in West Ham had fundraised for it—I can tell Members that an awful lot of people have wanted to do just that—she could not have got it. We are not talking about huge numbers; we are talking about fewer than 100 babies a year. Treating this condition should not break our bank—it could not, surely.

NICE met again two weeks ago—we held a vigil while it was making its decision—but I am told it could be three or more weeks yet before that decision is known. This is callous. Making families, making Maryam and making the other babies wait this long is callous. The NICE approvals process for Spinraza has now taken 14 months. That is longer than many of the babies with SMA1 can be expected to live without the treatment. At the same time, agreements have been reached on Spinraza in the United States and in 25 European countries, including Scotland, Germany, Italy, Lithuania and Romania.

NICE has failed Maryam and all the other babies with SMA, but others are culpable, too. The closure of the access programme no doubt saved Biogen some money, but I am sure that it was closed to increase pressure on NICE as well. I cannot say that that is definitely true, but what I will say is that if it is true, the suffering of tiny babies, and the pain and suffering of their families, too, has been used in the service and pursuit of profits. I now believe that our whole system of for-profit medical research combined with public healthcare encourages this kind of brinksmanship, it encourages delaying tactics and it encourages the exploitation of sick children and their families.

Let us also consider the actions or inaction of the Government. I am sure hon. Members will recall how in the spring statement the Chancellor talked of a

“proud, successful, outward-looking nation, with no limit to our ambition and no boundaries to what we can achieve.”—[Official Report, 13 March 2019; Vol. 656, c. 352.]

He bragged about

“the single largest cash commitment ever made by a peacetime British Government”.—[Official Report, 13 March 2019; Vol. 656, c. 346.]

This was for the NHS. Surely we can afford to help these babies, too. Currently, we are the fifth richest country in the world, yet we are withholding vital medical treatment from babies. This is medicine that 25 other European countries, including some much poorer than we are, are willing to provide. What does that say about us? What does that say about our values? What kind of a country have we become?

I have asked the Prime Minister to act—twice. I have asked the Health Secretary to act. As far as I can see, nothing has happened. I hope that Conservative Members will forgive me when I say that I thought the Prime Minister’s response to me last week was cold; it was more about defending an outdated process than about understanding and empathising with the desperate plight of Maryam and her family. Let us remember that 25 European countries already have access to this drug, We do not, yet it seems to be nothing to do with the Prime Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making a good and powerful speech. Two of my constituents, Mark and Panna Wilson, are in a situation similar to that of her constituents: their son Aadi is only three years old and is regressing every day because he, too, has SMA, which is a terrible condition. They told me that

“without access to new treatments, each and every day is a step, not towards an exciting future, but towards a painful and dark place.”

The hon. Lady is right, and I hope that we will find a new route to the approval of Spinraza in this country. The route it is currently going through is intended for much more generic medicines and it has not been put through the route for rare medicines. We need either to put it through the route for rare medicines or to find or invent a new mechanism so that we can get treatment for these people. As she points out, this is a rich country: we must be able to save these babies and toddlers.

[Lyn Brown]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. This is a political issue—what we are discussing today is political. It is about which of our constituents get access to which medicines, and when; who our public healthcare service helps with our public money; and who we allow to die without help.

Members on both sides of the Chamber have recently urged the Government to use their Crown use licensing powers in the case of Orkambi. Those powers can get around medicine patents when pharmaceutical companies are simply refusing to deal honestly with the NHS, and they are an option. There are always options for the Government if they wish to use them, but they seem to be content with voicing frustration. They do not do anything—they will not even threaten to do anything that might help. If the Patents Act 2004 is not working, as Ministers have said, we need to do something to replace it. Maryam’s family and others want action now. They need Spinraza now; when will they get it?

Eurotunnel: Payment

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

No. It is clear that we needed to ensure that there were no risks around the two contracts for the capacity that we need to bring in an unhindered supply of medicines, whatever the Brexit scenario. I do not know whether the hon. Lady thinks it would have been worth bearing the risk of a court case, which may well have struck down the capacity to make sure that people who have serious and life-threatening conditions can get the medicines that they want. She implied that she was against such assurances, and I think that would have been a mistake.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

I support the withdrawal agreement—it is a good deal—but I also support our being ready for no-deal eventualities. I was reassured by the Secretary of State’s answer to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) about stockpiling medicines that can be stockpiled, but for those that cannot be stockpiled, what action is the Secretary of State taking to be sure that they can be air-freighted rather than have to come through the tunnel?

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend is quite right to support a deal and the action that we have taken in case there is no deal. That is the position that anybody who cares about the unhindered supply of medicines should take. When it comes to those medicines that cannot be stockpiled, we have contracts for flights to ensure that those medicines can be flown in. We have in place a flight from Birmingham to Maastricht, and the return journey, obviously, to ensure that we can get those short-term medicines in.