---

Department of Health

This has been a very good debate, and I am delighted to have had the opportunity both to listen and to respond to it. I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker: I am part of a Standing Committee upstairs, so I had to depart once and was unable to hear all that my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) had to say. I join other hon. Members in congratulating the Health Committee on its work. Its report has already proved to be a very important; it has led to action by the Government and the pharmaceutical industry. I am sure that the Health Committee will help to guide and press for action in the future. As the Chairman of the Select Committee said, it will return to the issue and rightly so, and it would be very useful if it did precisely that in one or two instances that I might mention during my remarks. I want to say a special word of thanks to David Hinchliffe, the former Member for Wakefield, who was Chairman of the Health Committee when I was a member of it in the early part of the 1997 to 2001 Parliament. He did a remarkable job. Many people across the NHS very much valued his work, and the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) will be a distinguished and equally competent successor. The right hon. Gentleman was quite right to point to the importance of safety, which is a central issue. I was surprised, particularly during the discussion of Vioxx, that there was little mention of the subsequent actions by the pharmaceutical industry to promote the publication of all clinical trial data. That is an important matter. The Select Committee considered the origin of the problems with Vioxx, and they were substantially related to the failure of transparency on clinical trial data, as well as, arguably, the company responses. If we are to deal with those problems, we require not only ethical responses on the part of pharmaceutical companies, but the sort of transparency that allows early indications of effectiveness to be challenged by others using the data. The hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) rightly illustrated the fact that it is terribly important to use the data properly. However, if he is right and there have been instances where conclusions reported in medical journals are not consistent with the data—that would be entirely wrong—it is absolutely essential that other researchers have access to the data in a form that allows them to engage in the scientific method and to challenge the conclusion that others have reached. That is what science is about. We applaud scientists for what they are doing, so we should give them the maximum opportunity to use their method in that way.