NHS Pay

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Whitford]

Okay—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I appreciate that the hon. Member for Lincoln (Ms Lee) is new to the House, but Members do not make interventions while they are sitting down. If you wish to intervene, you must stand up to do it. I have noticed this happening quite a lot. This is not a general discussion, but a debate.

[Dr Whitford]

It is very important that people recognise the role that everyone plays, but for nurses in particular this is not just a matter of pay. Last year, we spent a lot of time debating changes to working tax credits, which can leave a lone parent nurse very much worse off. We also spent a lot of time debating the imposition of tuition fees and the removal of the nursing bursary. The nursing bursary still exists in Scotland. It is a non-means tested bursary of £6,500, potentially with a caring supplement of £3,500. We know that the average age to take up nursing study is at the end of the 20s, which means that people often have family commitments. Such people will receive approximately £10,000 a year so that, at the end, they will not face what future nurses in England will face, which is a debt of more than £50,000. The repayment on that kicks in immediately, because graduate nurses start at around £22,000, which is over the limit. At the lower end of band 5, that is another £400 a year off. By the time a nurse gets to the top of band 5, it is another £1,000 a year off. They will never manage to pay off that £50,000 to £60,000, which means that their salary will be reduced by that amount throughout their careers.

Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his extremely kind words, and for his courtesy, which he always shows at the Dispatch Box and in the Chamber.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

Like the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), this will be my last time speaking in the Chamber before Dissolution, and as a newbie I also want to pay tribute to the staff of the House, who made coming here much easier than we had expected it to be. I am also glad that my final speech before Dissolution is on a Bill that, despite some of our disagreements, we have worked on on a cross-party basis to produce a piece of work that we all agreed needed to be done.

I, too, welcome Government amendment (b), although I would have laid out the three paragraphs the other way around, because the whole point of the NHS, and the whole reason we are discussing this, is patient access: that is the No. 1 concern. I would have put patients first, not third. The fear of not getting access to drugs is a great issue for patients. As the hon. Gentleman mentioned, we have a significant delay that is measurable in comparison with other countries. For certain types of cancer, our performance in relation to patients with early disease is as good as anywhere, but we fall down in dealing with people with difficult or advanced disease. That is because of the delay.

I want briefly to mention the interaction of the budget impact assessment with our no longer being part of the European Medicines Agency. I am not talking about the United Kingdom losing the agency itself; I am talking about our no longer being part of the scheme. We know that there is a danger that drugs are presented for licensing in the United Kingdom at a later date than in the United States and the European Union, which are major markets. It is likely that we could also be behind Japan. I am not suggesting that we should simply hand over any amount of money, but if we were also seen as a hostile market in which there was an expected delay of three years for expensive drugs, there would be a danger that international pharma would simply say, “You know what? We’ll license everywhere else, then we’ll come back to the UK in a few years.” That could result in significant delayed access for our patients.

We need to think about how all this feeds into trials and research, and into the life sciences system. If we are not using what is considered to be the gold standard drug at the time of a new international trial, we will not be able to take part in the comparison of the gold standard with the new drug. The UK has led the EU research network, which is the biggest research network in the world. We have been a major player in that, and it is important to realise how building in this delay from NHS England could undermine that. Surely this should be part of the NICE process. It should be clear to pharma, when it comes with a drug at a price, what process it will have to go through, what evidence it will have to bring forward and how it will have to negotiate a price. I fear that there will be delays in drugs being licensed.

This will affect us in Scotland even though NICE decisions do not apply to us. If a drug were simply not licensed here, it would be irrelevant that the Scottish Medicines Consortium chose to fund it—as it did the other week with Kadcyla—because it would still be an unlicensed medicine. We need to look at how the loss of the European Medicines Agency will work in this regard. There should not be a separate procedure after NICE that could suddenly hit pharma with another barrier to jump over. This will hit new cancer drugs, because they are expensive. It will particularly hit drugs for rare diseases, which the EMA has led on, because they are bespoke and therefore inevitably expensive. The £20 million limit would mean that if someone came up with a fabulous cure for dementia, for example, a budget impact assessment would be triggered.