Cancer Treatment

Steve Reed Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) on securing this important debate, and on making what I thought was a remarkable speech. I remember her telling me, days after her election, about the loss of her father. It was such a keenly felt loss, but I know how proud he must have felt to see his daughter enter this place—I think he hung on to see that happen. Had he heard her speech—and perhaps he did—I think that it would justify every ounce of his pride in her.

I will start by paying tribute to Tessa Jowell, if I may. She was one of the Members of Parliament representing the London borough of Lambeth when I was first leader of the opposition and then leader of the council. She was a fantastic, supportive local MP. Despite her serious, significant roles in Government, she was always available to talk to me about my role and the community that we both cherished and loved and for which we wanted to do our best. She became my mentor, and she became my friend.

Tessa was always thinking about how we could do more to help people, particularly the most vulnerable. We worked together to open schools and Sure Start centres. I particularly remember that in the mid-noughties, when there was that terrible spike in violent youth crime and knife crime—similar to what we are seeing now—in Tessa’s beloved Brixton, where she had started her career as a social worker, she took me to see a community-led project called Exit on the Moorlands estate, one of the most deprived inner-city estates in the country, where there was a horrifically high level of youth engagement in violence. Young people knew by name others who had been killed, including friends.

Tessa took me to see that project, which had been set up by the community. It was supported by youth workers and the police, but with the community in charge, and it was making a dramatic difference to the life chances of those young people by getting them out of danger—getting them out of gangs and steering them back on to a safer path that was giving them back the future that should have been theirs as a birthright. Tessa took me to see that project not just because she wanted the council’s support for it, but because she was teaching me an important lesson: it was not my job as a politician to find the answers for people; it was my job as a politician to help people find the answers for themselves, because they would be better answers. I have brought that lesson with me into Parliament; like many of us, I would not be here if it were not for Tessa, and Tessa taught me that people-based politics.

That same compassion, empathy and drive to support and help people is what has led Tessa to turn this great personal challenge in her own life today into a way to bring about change to help others. For that reason, as well as many others, I am very proud to stand here today and support Tessa’s campaign.

As we have been hearing, brain tumour research is underfunded and undervalued compared with other types of cancer research, despite the fact that it kills more people under the age of 40 than any other type of cancer and is the biggest killer of children of any kind of cancer. So we need to match the progress made in survival rates for other forms of cancer, such as leukaemia and breast cancer, by focusing much more on brain tumour cancer and what we can do as a country and a society to help people who find themselves living with that form of cancer.

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

May I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the courage and bravery of our friend, Baroness Tessa Jowell, and particularly her significant decision to make her medical data available? Does my hon. Friend agree that, given the low level of participation in clinical trials, if we are to achieve much better results for patients, the Government and all of us must do much more to encourage participation in these trials in all of our local areas and in our national politics?

[Mr Reed]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that well-timed intervention. We absolutely need to boost participation in clinical trials. Only 6.4% of adults with this particular form of cancer take part in those trials, whereas over 61% of people with leukaemia participate, so there is a clear need for a major increase in the numbers participating in these trials if we are to get the data we need to learn. I join my right hon. Friend, too, in congratulating Baroness Jowell on her historic decision to become the first patient to consent to share her data fully and openly, in order to speed up the discovery of new cures and ways to help other people; she is an example to so many people in so many ways, but here again we need to learn from Tessa’s example, because that is how we will help to find a cure for this terrible form of cancer.

I say to Ministers, who will be responsible for regulation as well as funding, that it is important that regulation is not drawn so tightly that it does not allow for innovation and for new treatments to be developed. We must be open to doing things in different ways and to learning from failure as well as success; we cannot regulate against failure, but we can always learn from it so that we can improve.

We must increase the funding going into the kind of research that will find a cure for this form of cancer and put it on a par with other, perhaps more high-profile, forms of cancer that have attracted levels of funding that are making a bigger difference. In that respect, I put my name on record in welcoming and congratulating the Government on the increase in funding of £45 million —I believe that is the figure—announced since the very moving debate, which many of us attended in the House of Lords, led by Tessa Jowell.

Tessa has been a fighter all her life and now she is in the fight of her life, but how typical it is that she has turned it into a fight to allow others to live well, live better and live longer. Every one of us in this Chamber, and many others beyond, are proud to stand with Tessa today. I would like to say this to her, if I may: Tessa, you have all our love and all our respect. Please keep going and keep being the inspiration to all of us that you have always been.

[Hon. Members]

Hear, hear!