Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Debate between Baroness Masham of Ilton and Lord O'Shaughnessy

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB) [V]]

My Lords, in supporting Amendment 61 and the others in this group, I declare an interest as I have a farm and I often use vets, who supply veterinary products and medicines. I must say that vets have been exceedingly careful and all precautions have been taken that have been put in place for protection over Covid-19. The Veterinary Medicines Directorate protects animal and public health and the environment. This needs our support, which this amendment provides, as it ensures that safety remains a priority.

In recent years, over half the veterinary surgeons who register in the UK each year have qualified elsewhere in the EU and the EEA—38.5% from the UK, 52% from the EU and EEA, and 9.5% from other countries. Free movement of people has had an enormous impact on our veterinary workforce. Additional barriers to the movement of EEA-qualified vets to the UK will have significant consequences for animal health and welfare, public health and trade. If understaffing happens, it will become a safety issue. Some 95% of the veterinary workforce in abattoirs graduated overseas, mainly from the EU. This information comes from the British Veterinary Association. Does Regulation (EU) 2019/6 on veterinary medicinal products aim to make more medicines available in the EU to treat and prevent diseases in animals through simplifying our procedures for obtaining a marketing authorisation and reviewing incentives for breakthrough medicines? The Bill provides the means to make “corresponding or similar provision” to both regulations. Will the Minister give an assurance that that will happen? It is a safety issue and very important.

To make the UK an attractive place to do research and development, the much-needed bright people coming from abroad should feel wanted and safe. It is time that the UK realises that we cannot achieve the high standards that we want without help from others in veterinary science. We should be welcoming and kind to each other. I hope that the Minister will help to prioritise safety in this important Bill. I send my best wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, and hope that she gets better soon.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I echo the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, about the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. I am sure that we all send her our very best wishes.

I speak on the amendments tabled by my noble friend the Minister. However, on a quick clarification on something that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, said in the last debate, which is germane to this debate, I was not making the point that I believe that there can be trade-offs between safety and attractiveness as the Bill currently defines it. Rather it was around the effectiveness and efficacy of medicines and medical devices—points that were, thankfully, made much more clearly by my noble friend Lord Lansley than they were by me—and the impact on what that means for safety and its overridingness as a priority, even if it is always our most important consideration.

On the substance of the amendments, I am sure that my noble friend was not expecting complete consensus around his amendments and he certainly has not found it yet. However, I applaud him for his clarifications on the impact of the attractiveness subsection and also applaud him for moving so quickly in response to noble Lords’ concerns. None the less, there is an issue around this, which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, brought out. It is an unfortunate truth that the NHS has a poor history of performance in scaling up innovative medicines and devices. I know that that is something that my noble friend is very concerned about.

I have a specific question in this area. In asking it, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests, in particular as an adviser to Healthy.io. Do my noble friend’s plans for improving the attractiveness of the UK include improving the attractiveness of the UK as a place to develop, trial and scale data-driven health technologies? I know that we will come to that topic later, when the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, has his amendments, but can my noble friend confirm that they are included in the definition of devices and explain his intentions in this regard?