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Lucentis

I am pleased to see that the Minister agrees. Miss Y does not wish to be named because she is a frail lady of pensionable age who does not want an enormous amount of press publicity flowing around her. Mr. X does not wish to be named because he is working and his employer does not yet know of his difficulties. For understandable reasons, he does not wish his employer to become—possibly prematurely—alarmed. Miss Y is well known to me. She is a pillar of the Maidstone community and a lady with whom I have worked on many a charitable project. In particular, she has shown tremendous initiative in co-ordinating a charity that helps to teach children English in the Ukraine. She helped to start it, and it continues to this day. Needless to say, she is a lady of great responsibility who has saved all her life. She has her own very small and modest flat and had saved to ensure that she would be able to meet the rainy days of her retirement. I visited Miss Y at home and saw first hand the difficulties that she is now experiencing as her independence is snatched from her bit by bit because of a deterioration in her sight. She is losing the sight of both eyes. Members of the public often read the press and get the idea that there is a miracle cure and demand it, but what is crucial in this case is that her consultant recommended to her that she try Lucentis. She asked whether it would be funded. That was slightly before the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence decreed that the treatment would be licensed and she was advised that it would not be funded. Nevertheless, she applied. The consultant said that there was an urgency to her condition, so at the same time this pensioner lady began to pay from her savings for private treatment. That cost her well in excess of £5,000 but—and this is crucial—it has been effective. It has arrested what had been a steady decline and gives her not much but something by way of sight. That reminds me of a lady who stood up at a recent meeting I attended—not about this matter at all; it was a general charitable do—and said to me, ““Miss Widdecombe, do you realise that the only reason I can see you tonight is because I have paid for it?”” Under no circumstances should we have such a system. People have always had the ability to opt out of the NHS because they preferred private facilities, but on this occasion, we are building up a picture of people who do not opt out, but are driven out because the NHS will not supply that which enables them to do something as basic as see. When I took up this lady's case with the PCT, it wrote back that her visual acuity was ““outside the accepted range””, but that was because she had paid to ensure that it was. Let me come on to the case of Mr. X. He is not a pensioner; he is only 39. He has a family of five and both he and his wife work full time. He suffers from proliferative diabetic retinopathy, but combined with that, he also suffers from retinal vein occlusion. He is now losing his sight. The recommendation for Lucentis was again not made by him, but by his own consultant at Maidstone hospital as long ago as 2007. Mr. X was denied Lucentis. Mr. X, who naturally enough lives in Maidstone, has had to travel to Southport every six weeks to receive treatment. I am sure that the Minister's geography is more than up to working out the distance between Maidstone and Southport. The treatment costs £465 and the travel has to be paid on top. He has to take a day off work and, because his sight obviously limits his mobility, so, too, does his wife. They are supporting a family of five and they do not have the time to take off work. Mr. X is concerned for his future. He wants to go on working, but he cannot see that lasting for ever. When I wrote to the PCT, I said that"““this man is too young to go blind””—" as if there were ever a right age— and that"““he needs assistance, and he needs it now””." Such assistance has still been denied. The most recent development is the PCT writing to Mr. X to tell him that the appeal panel has deferred the decision. The letter was so cold that I actually wrote back to the PCT:"““I have seen more sympathetic letters from motor mechanics””." That, regrettably, is true, as there was no expression of sympathy and no hope for the future. Once again, a constituent has to pay to try to ensure that he gets what his consultant recommended in the first place. Very rarely, if at all, do I quote in this House anything to do with my other role as a columnist for the Daily Express. I did, however, write about the provision of Lucentis when the newspaper was running a campaign on behalf of the war veteran, Jack Patch. As a result of the huge publicity, his PCT backed off and he is now getting his treatment, but I was flooded with letters from other Members' constituents expressing dismay that they were going blind and could not get the treatment funded, so had to pay for it themselves to avoid going blind. As the Minister well knows, if people are allowed to go blind, the costs to the state are horrendous. Mr. X will cease work, so he will not be productive from the age of 39 to 65 when he otherwise would have been. He will require benefits, and he will get them, as he will qualify for them. He will require all manner of additional care, and it will be forthcoming. Therefore, it does not even make economic sense to let people go blind instead of ensuring that they retain their sight for as long as possible. To go off track—I do not expect the Minister to answer this point—I recently read of a lady who went progressively deaf and who has a young child. She was told that a cochlear implant would solve the problem, but that her PCT would not fund the admittedly considerable cost of such an operation. In a 21st century health service, we have people who are not enabled to see, and people who are not enabled to hear—I reckon Nye Bevan is probably turning in his grave. Many years ago, when I was shadowing one of the Minister's predecessors, I predicted that NICE would turn out to be extremely nasty. That is what NICE has turned out to be—very nasty indeed. We are talking about real people, whose illnesses are real. The solutions have been proposed by consultants, not witch doctors, and yet they cannot get help. Will the Minister consider urgently what can be done for people such as the two constituents in different situations whom I have mentioned, and for all those others whom I am not directly representing tonight?