Asked by: Lee Anderson (Reform UK - Ashfield)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what his Department’s plans are to increase the UK’s vaccine manufacturing capacity to meet future demand.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The Government has invested over £300 million to secure and scale-up the UK’s manufacturing capabilities to be able to respond to the pandemic, including:
a) Facilities that have come online:
b) Facilities that will come online later this year, to help provide longer term UK capacity:
Asked by: Lord Campbell-Savours (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government on what date the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus will be fully operational for the manufacture of vaccines.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) should be partially open in summer 2021, with the facility fully operational in 2022. The VMIC is working towards having fill-finish capability by the end of 2021. The objective remains to accelerate the readiness of the VMIC by a year and we are on track to achieve this.
Asked by: Lord Campbell-Savours (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the estimated vaccine production manufacturing capacity of the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The estimated vaccine production manufacturing capacity of the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre will be up to 70 million doses of vaccine within six months, once it has opened.
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what the UK manufacturing capacity is of the covid-19 vaccine.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The Government has invested over £300 million to secure and scale up the UK’s manufacturing capabilities to be able to respond to the pandemic. This includes:
a) Facilities that have come online:
b) Facilities that will come online later this year, to help provide longer term UK capacity:
In addition to the above, we have also funded the expansion of the Valneva factory in Livingston, Scotland.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 26 January 2021 to Question 141474, how many additional vaccine doses per month the expanded Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre facility can produce as a result of the investment outlined in that Answer; and of which types of vaccine.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
When fully operationally in 2022, the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) will have several Good Manufacturing Process suites that will be able to accommodate a range of production scale capabilities. For pandemic response, the VMIC will be able to make up to 70 million doses of a vaccine within a 6-month timeframe. This is a significant increase to the VMIC’s originally anticipated capacity.
The VMIC has been designed to be a flexible manufacturing facility and will be able to manufacture a range of vaccine types, such as messenger RNA, viral vector, or protein sub-unit.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many UK based manufacturing facilities are capable of re-engineering and manufacturing (a) mRNA, (b) viral vector, (c) whole virus and (d) protein subunit vaccines to address emerging variants of the covid-19 virus.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The Government has made several strategic investments in UK vaccine manufacturing capabilities to increase its capacity, ensuring we are able to manufacture across different vaccine technologies and embed resilience. This includes:
Both the VMIC and Braintree sites are flexible to vaccine types, including messenger RNA (mRNA), viral vector, and protein sub-unit. These sites could have a role in providing capability to manufacture vaccines to address the emerging variants of the COVID-19 virus.
The Government has also invested through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to support the creation of a new Centre of Excellence in mRNA vaccine manufacture at the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), with equipment that can manufacture mRNA for vaccines. This funding has upgraded CPI’s National Biologics Manufacturing Centre at Darlington to obtain good manufacturing practice certification for the manufacture of RNA products including mRNA for clinical trials. A key advantage of RNA vaccines is how quickly they can be developed compared with other platforms.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answers of 19 January 2021 to Questions 137942 and 137941, if he will provide a breakdown of the £300 million invested in securing and scaling up UK manufacturing capacity by (a) type of capacity, (b) geographical location and (c) the date that investment was delivered.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The Government invested over £300 million in 2020 to secure and scale-up the UK’s manufacturing capabilities to respond to this pandemic, including:
- £127 million towards the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult Braintree in Essex;
- £93 million to accelerate the completion and expanded role of the Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire;
- £4.7 million for skills training through the Advanced Therapies Skills Training Network, which will be delivered through both virtual and physical centres;
- £8.75 million for the set-up of the rapid deployment facility at Oxford Biomedica in Oxfordshire; and
- £65.5 million for the manufacture of the University of Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine.
In addition to the above, we have also funded the fill and finish of vaccines through a contract with Wockhardt in Wrexham, North Wales, as well as the expansion of the Valneva factory in Livingston, Scotland. However, we are not able to give further details on these two developments owing to commercial confidentiality.
Asked by: John Spellar (Labour - Warley)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what the existing weekly capacity for vaccine production is in the UK.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The UK has a strong manufacturing basis in vaccines and life sciences, with a range of sites around the country.
Through the Vaccine Taskforce, the Government has entered commercial arrangements with a number of these sites to manufacture and fill-finish COVID-19 vaccines. The Government has also invested over £230 million in expanding the UK’s vaccine manufacturing base, through several investments, such as the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre and Cell and Gene Manufacturing and Innovation Centre.
Asked by: Sarah Owen (Labour - Luton North)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what support the Government is providing to projects working on a covid-19 vaccine.
Answered by Amanda Solloway - Government Whip, Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury
The Government is supporting efforts to rapidly develop a coronavirus vaccine as soon as possible. This includes reviewing regulations and scaling up manufacturing, so that when a vaccine becomes available, it can be produced quickly and in large quantities. To date the UK government has secured early access to 340 million vaccines doses through agreements with six separate vaccine developers. This includes agreements with University of Oxford’s vaccine being developed with AstraZeneca and agreements with BioNTech/Pfizer alliance, Valneva, Novavax, Janssen and GSK/Sanofi Pasteur.
The Government has also taken action to ensure the country’s vaccine manufacturing capabilities are scaled up, so that if a vaccine is found to be effective it can be made available to the public as quickly as possible. The Government has announced a £93 million investment to open the UK’s first dedicated Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, and an additional £38 million for a virtual centre of existing capability, in order to begin manufacturing at scale in the near future.
Asked by: Lord Scriven (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assurances they have received from companies about how many vaccinations for COVID-19 it will be possible to manufacture and produce in the UK by December.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
Owing to commercial sensitivities the Government is not able to reveal such information concerning vaccine developers at this time. The Vaccines Taskforce has taken action to scale up UK vaccine manufacturing capabilities, so that if and when a vaccine is found it can be produced at pace. This includes funding to accelerate and expand the new Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, bring online a Rapid Deployment Facility, and a new state-of-the-art centre to scale up COVID-19 vaccine and gene therapy manufacturing. Government has also partnered with Wockhardt to provide fill and finish services.