Merck Research Site

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

The shortage of medicines is always a problem. We cannot have a situation where essential medicines are not available. That speaks to better understanding of supply chain resilience. The noble Baroness will be aware that supply chain resilience came to the fore very much over the past few years, when it was obvious that most countries did not understand their supply chains. A lot of work has been done on understanding supply chains and making sure there is resilience for essential medicines. There are opportunities there in terms of how the UK can work more closely with Europe to ensure that we get better supply chain resilience.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware, because I have raised this issue with him personally, that when I was the Life Sciences Minister, I wanted to work with other parts of government which were involved in life sciences. When I asked my private office to do a survey of government, it found someone in the Treasury, someone in No. 10 and someone in DIT. We insisted that all people in government working on life sciences should meet together so that we could have a co-ordinated approach. I understand that those meetings did not continue. I have raised this issue with the Minister. Have those meetings recommenced? When did all the relevant people in government on life sciences last met?

My second question is about VPAG or VPAS. Given that many of the people who negotiate for the pharmaceutical companies have worked for the NHS, they will understand the challenges on both sides of the table. Could the Minister ask the industry for some blue-sky thinking, especially from those who have worked in the NHS and understand the pressures but are now working in private industry?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I have indeed tried to continue the brilliant work of the noble Lord on bringing together parts of government in this area; I met people from many different departments about this as recently as yesterday. We are joining up the life sciences sector right the way across government. On the point about blue-sky thinking, that is exactly one of the things we have done with industry leaders. We said, “Could you think about the most imaginative way to come up with answers to some of these?” We got a piece of work on that, and we will continue working with them. There are indeed people from the NHS working in industry and people from industry working here, and of course I have quite an extensive background of understanding the pharmaceutical sector.