Access To Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill

Rebecca Harris Excerpts

Friday 29th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) on navigating the Bill to this stage. His pursuit of legislation in this area has sparked an important debate on the Floor of the House about how we can improve access to innovative treatments.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this group of amendments, and I support the broad thrust of all of them. I commend the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) for her speech and the contribution that she has made—she spoke with great knowledge and passion.

I am particularly pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) has tabled new clauses on the important issue of off-patent drugs and off-label uses, which he has championed. I was sorry to see his Bill fall on Second Reading in November and hope we can make more progress with the Government today.

Improving access to off-patent drugs so that people, no matter where they live or by whom they are being treated, are offered well-evidenced treatments that might not be routinely commissioned, is an ambition shared by many in the House, regardless of political persuasion. The Minister shares those objectives. Over the past few weeks and months, he has worked with key stakeholders and discussed the issue with them.

I express my support for new clause 1, which requires the Department of Health to produce an action plan for developing a pathway for off-patent, repurposed drugs, where strong evidence of their effectiveness in a new indication exists, with the aim of securing their routine use in such an indication. I hope the Minister can commit to such an action plan and put forward a clear timetable for progress, which is long overdue. I also hope he can offer the House reassurance on the proposals in new clauses 2 to 6, all of which have merit and deserve proper consideration by the Government.

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Lady had wished to contribute but toddled out of the Chamber at the appropriate moment. I would have called her but did not because she was not here. Does she still wish to speak?

[Rebecca Harris]

Very briefly, Mr Speaker.

I support the Bill and commend all those who have worked towards it in the many iterations it has been through in this House and the other place—I can see that Members of the other place are taking an interest in our proceedings today.

I am chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on brain tumours. Brain tumour research has desperately lagged behind other areas of cancer research, and we desperately need to find new sources of treatment. Sadly, brain tumour is still the biggest cancer killer of the under- 40s—children and young adults. The Bill could be a great step forward in the sharing of information.

I commend the Minister, as all hon. Members have. Without wishing to sound too toadying, we have a Minister who is committed to taking forward progress on research in a way that we have not seen previously.

It should be pointed out that the NHS is a superb innovative organisation that does huge amounts of research. We do not hear that said often enough of the NHS. From my point of view, the most important bit of the Bill is the database, which will mean we can take forward the research we do in the NHS so that people can have access to information—not just patients, but clinicians, who might not know as much as we or they would hope. I very much hope the Bill makes progress.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences (George Freeman)]

It is a great pleasure to take part in the debate and to support a package of amendments that have been agreed by Members on a cross-party basis over the past few weeks and months. Very often in private Members’ business, the Government take the view that the intentions are fine but the mechanism is flawed, and that the Government legislate while MPs raise issues. However, with this Bill, we have struck a blow for joined-up thinking and cross-party working in pursuit of patients’ interests—I will say more about that on Third Reading.

With my hon. Friends the Members for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) and for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), and the hon. Members for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) and for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), and with the help of Opposition Front Benchers, we have managed to deal with three Bills with which the House has been preoccupied in recent months—the Bill initiated by Lord Saatchi, which looked to change the culture of innovation; the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Torfaen, which promoted the use of off-patent repurposed drugs; and this Bill, introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry, which seeks to promote access to innovative medicines. With the package of amendments we have agreed, we will end up with a Bill that moves forward on those three areas of concern for Members in all parties of the House. Today is a rare and rather wonderful moment because the amendments are supported by every party in the House—I cannot speak for the United Kingdom Independence party because I have not heard anything from it, but all other parties support the Bill.

We have three groups of amendments to get through so I will try to be brief in dealing with the specific points, many of which have previously been raised and discussed. I should take this opportunity to pay tribute to and thank my officials who, over the past three to six months, have tirelessly worked with Members on both sides of the House in an unusual way to help to draft amendments that we can all support. I thank them for their diligence in doing so.

Broadly, the intention of the package of amendments is to introduce off-label repurposed medicines in the Bill, and to put it four square at the heart of the agenda. As the hon. Member for Torfaen said, I wholeheartedly supported the intention of his Bill and its predecessor, but not the mechanism. We now have a mechanism that will work.

I appreciate that the new clauses are probing and that hon. Members are seeking my reassurance on how the Government will take things forward. New clause 1 is a request for an action plan. Nobody seriously thinks that we should put an action plan in the Bill, but let me set out my commitment and that of the Government to pursuing this agenda with time and rigour. As I have said in other places, the truth is that the world of drug discovery is changing profoundly. The transformational power of genomics and informatics create a wholly new opportunity both to discover new medicines and target them at individual patients much more quickly, and to discover repurposed uses of existing drugs in a way that we have not been able to do previously. The 100,000 Genome Project, which the Government have initiated and funded, has already begun to identify existing drugs that have uses in indications that were not hitherto known. The pace at which new drugs are being developed and discovered is increasing, which is a credit to the creativity of the sector.

That sets the backdrop for the creation of my post and the accelerated access review that I have launched. As all hon. Members know, I am committed to putting in place a landscape that accelerates the use of NHS resources to support research. When we launched the strategy, the Prime Minister said that every patient should be a research patient and that every hospital should be a research hospital. We are determined to ensure that the daily footprint of diagnosis and treatment is used more intelligently to support research.

The accelerated access review is looking at that in a lot of detail and is an extensive piece of work. Colleagues have referred to the interim report—the final recommendations are due to arrive on my desk at Easter. I am very happy to give a commitment that, in our response to that report, we will pick up the points made in the debate and in the Bill on ensuring that we look at repurposing and off-label uses of existing drugs as much as we look at innovative medicines.

In new clauses 2 and 3, hon. Members are probing me to give details on how the National Institute for Health Research and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence can put into practice the mechanism that we have discussed. On new clause 2, there are very open mechanisms currently for applications to the NIHR to research existing medicines. The NIHR—I am delighted that we have reconfirmed our £1 billion a year funding for it—conducts research every year into existing medicines, and there is a clear process for that. It would not be appropriate to legislate in a Bill to tell organisations that are subject to the Haldane principle, which is sacrosanct for the Government, what to do. We want research to be led by that principle, but I am happy—I will say more about this in a moment—to ensure that, through the process, we explore mechanisms for ensuring the NICE can look at evidence and develop evidence-based guidance on off-label medicines, so that doctors are aware of which drugs are being used in an off-label indication.

On new clause 3, I am delighted to confirm that, after discussions, NICE is now looking at ways to collect evidence on repurposed medicines. It is looking at taking evidence and how it could use, through its existing evidence review process, evidence on repurposed medicines specifically. I have asked whether we might be able to put a mechanism in place to find a way to somehow put that into the “British National Formulary”. I would not want to put that mechanism into the Bill, because we need the freedom to evolve the mechanism and to get it right. I hope that is a helpful reassurance.