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Department of Health

I should like to start by echoing the comments of the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess), who paid tribute to the previous Chair of the Health Committee, the former hon. Member for Wakefield. I also pay tribute to the staff of the Committee, particularly the excellent Committee specialists, who assist the Clerks so ably. I also echo the comment that the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) has shaped up well in his first few Health Committee meetings. I agree with the hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) that the Government’s response to the report was rather slim. It was also incredibly late. We finished our report on 5 April, but the response did not come out until September. I had imagined that the people who wrote these responses would not have much to do during the general election campaign. I do not think that the Minister wrote very much of it. Why was the response released right in the middle of the recess, when no one could really comment on it and we could not get any press coverage? My other complaint about the response is that it is the most difficult one to follow that I have ever seen. We made 48 recommendations. The Government, in their wisdom, have renumbered them, so anyone who reads them has to have both copies open in front of them. They would need to work out that our recommendation No. 18 was the Government’s recommendation No. 2. Perhaps we made a mistake with the heading ““Conclusions and recommendations””. The Government may have thought that they were to respond to recommendations and not to conclusions. In any event, they responded to only 32 of our 48 recommendations, although, to be fair, some of their responses to those covered some of the others. Although much has been said by other Members, regrettably only the hon. Member for Southend, West and I were on the Committee. I think that I can reassure those who were photographed in a remarkable disguise. The hon. Member for Southend, West somehow avoided that. I must take it up with him afterwards: why on earth was he not present? The disguise was like Ku Klux Klan garb, without the pointed hat but with just a narrow slit to look through. As I do not think that many of us will have been recognisable, I am not too worried. Members have left me a good deal to cover. I shall begin with research. Five recommendations mentioned it, but only one was given the honour of a reply. As is well known, the Department of Health invests about a sixth of the amount invested by the drugs industry in research—about 0.8 per cent. of its budget. That may be why it did not feel willing or able to comment on an activity that is funded so generously by the industry. Our recommendation 2—I had to struggle to remember what number we gave it—was not mentioned in the response. It states:"““Priorities for research into medicines inevitably reflect the interests of the pharmaceutical companies and are not necessarily well aligned with the medical needs of all patients. The industry will continue to undertake the bulk of research in this area, but there are improvements which could be made. We welcome Lord Warner’s recognition of this and look forward to his proposals to align more closely the drug companies’ research strategies with the public health aims of the NHS.””" I thought that if Lord Warner, a Minister of State at the Department, had said that, there should have been a response, but try as I might, I could not find it.