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Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in his amendment. I thank the Minister for how he has worked with your Lordships’ House on all sides to improve this Bill; it is unfortunate that we remain with one point of disagreement. We certainly support the policy objective of the Bill in general and very much welcome the list of actions in the Minister’s introduction to promote research and drug development in this country. But in listening to his outline of his particular responsibilities, it occurred to me that no policy area is ever an island; they always impact on other things. The Minister’s responsibility to achieve best value for the NHS actually impacts on other responsibilities that he and his department have—in particular, in relation to this amendment, on the thriving life sciences sector, on which we all depend, and the access of patients to cutting edge medicines.

Both those things are suffering from particular threats at the moment. One is Brexit, which I shall not go into now; we have discussed it on many occasions. The other is the recent £20 million affordability test that the Government are introducing. Although £20 million sounds like a very large amount of money, if it is applied to medicines where the population of those needing the medicines is very large, such as some of those mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Warner—diabetes, breast cancer and other things—the individual cost to an individual patient does not need to be very high to be caught up by the affordability test. The Minister used the word “only”; he said that it would affect only one in five of medicines, but I think that that is an awful lot of medicines, and we should be very concerned about it. That is why we feel that it is important to press the Minister on this issue.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Warner, on offering the Government a compromise, which I hope would avoid what the Minister is clearly worried about: being taken to judicial review by a pharmaceutical company about efforts to push down the price of a medicine. I draw the Minister’s attention to the word “sector” in paragraph (a) of the proposed new clause, which asks the Government to take account of the need to,

“promote and support a growing life sciences sector”.

The word “sector” makes it unlikely that any pharmaceutical company trying to take the Government to judicial review would succeed if the Government had, in all other respects, promoted a thriving life sciences sector in this country. It is highly unlikely that they would do so.

I therefore hope that the Minister will think again and not resist this amendment. It is essential, given the current threats to patients in this country—and very large populations of patients too, in particular those coming towards the end of life—to pharmaceuticals, to treatments and access to medicines. I therefore hope that the Minister will reconsider, and, if the noble Lord, Lord Warner, wishes to test the opinion of the House, he will have the support of these Benches.

4.15 pm