Mitochondrial Replacement (Public Safety)

Robert Flello Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for securing this important debate. Some in this House are in favour of the treatment and oppose the motion, whereas others, like me, support the motion and oppose the procedure. The important thing is to have the debate and to put down a marker, and I hope that the Government do not try to rush these things through, as I believe they originally intended.

[Frank Dobson]

Consultation on this started in 2003. If this is a rush, how would my hon. Friend describe something that was slow?

[Robert Flello]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that. I have been in this House since 2005 and this is the first debate I have had here on this matter, even though the consultation may have started in 2003. I will return to the issue of the consultation shortly, if I am able to do so in the four minutes and 10 seconds remaining to me.

There is no doubt that this disease affects many children—I believe the figure is one in 6,500—and has some horrendous and devastating consequences. However, the chief medical officer seems to believe that perhaps 10 lives a year might be changed as a result of this treatment. That is absolutely important for the 10 people involved and their families, but my understanding of the science is that it is very hard for the researchers to know who those 10 people might be and how to decide which children might benefit and which might not.

I agree with a number of speakers who say that two issues are involved. I have grave concerns about this from not only a moral, ethical point of view, but a public safety point of view. Whatever someone’s position on mitochondrial transfer, I am sure we must all agree that we cannot authorise new research techniques that are unsafe or might be unsafe. In this context “unsafe” does not only mean that procedures may not work; it means that they may result in disabilities and illnesses. To put it crudely, there is every possibility that we could be legislating to allow techniques that could cause damaged embryos, resulting in further damaged children. That is not spin; it is a reasonable assumption based on the available data. Newcastle university’s own paper concluded that, compared with control experiments, 50% fewer eggs fertilised through pronuclear transfer reached the blastocyst stage—in other words, pronuclear transfer is twice as likely to cause the embryos to fail. No further work was conducted on why so many of these embryos developed abnormally, despite consistent calls from concerned scientists.

Based on the available data, therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that these techniques could cause the people born as a result to have illnesses or disabilities. The Government have a responsibility, as we all do, to avoid such eventualities, and we cannot take that lightly. We might not know the result for many generations. We might not know whether some damaged has been caused until three, four or five generations later. We simply cannot know that. Indeed, in a conversation I had with an hon. Friend in this House not a few hours ago there was talk of how science is about probabilities and risk; it is not fact but about what may or may not happen.

[Steve Brine]

I am listening carefully to what the hon. Gentleman says, and the way in which this debate is being conducted shows the House of Commons at its best. He is one of the co-sponsors of this debate and he is speaking out of a great deal of fear about what might happen. Is his wish, in supporting the motion, to kick this into the longest of long grass or to see it stopped dead in its tracks? Will he be clear about that?

[Robert Flello]

I can be even clearer than that, because it is neither of those things. I want further research done on the safety implications and I want the consultation to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) referred a while ago actually to be taken forward. Let us consider the polling the Government did. Their response to the consultation on mitochondrial transfer, published the day before the summer recess, tells us that

“700 expressed general support for the regulations and 1,152 opposed the introduction of the regulations with the remainder not expressing a view either way.”

Yet the same day the BBC quoted the Department of Health as saying:

“A public review into the three person IVF technique has been broadly supportive”.

That in turn enabled Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, to say:

“As the Government’s latest consultation has again shown, there is broad public support for making mitochondrial replacement therapy available to patients”.

That raises the question: in which world does 1,152 against and 700 in favour equate to “broadly supportive”? Does the Minister support her Department’s briefing that the consultation responses were “broadly supportive”? What further action does she intend to take to correct the highly misleading statement? Someone may think that the public were misinformed or that only a small group of people were responding and the responses were thus disrupted, but what is the point of having that consultation if no notice is going to be taken of it?

At the end of the day, there is concern about this matter. I have a concern—perhaps I am the only Member in this House who does—but if, as I fear, this legislation goes ahead in the autumn, I do not want to have to come back to this House to say to future generations, “Look what we did.” Once we go down this route and children start being born, there will be no turning back—[Interruption.] Yes, it is the power sell of the cell. There is not enough research on what the mitochondrial part does. Is it just a battery pack, or is it more? We just do not know. I do not want to have to stand up in this House and explain to generations of future children why we let them down.