Health and Care Bill

Debate between Lord Lexden and Lord Campbell-Savours

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Wednesday 16th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

I now invite the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, who is taking part remotely, to speak.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, this is an important amendment. To me, it is the most important in the Bill. It concerns preservation of life in conditions of general pandemics. If you leave worldwide vaccine manufacturing programmes to the free market, you will never fully deliver. Profit will always trump the public good, unless the state intervenes in some regulatory form or another. This is basically why I am a Labour person.

With that in mind, it is clear that the more we are told that the current arrangements for licensing and manufacturing are necessary for reasons of quality control, the more I am convinced that this is not the only consideration in mind. There are other considerations—primarily the need to maximise profit. There is nothing wrong with profit if the justification is reasonable. It drives initiative and entrepreneurship. However, when there are wider issues involved, as in the case of a global pandemic which threatens the well-being of nations and the international economy, there must be a consideration of the wider public good and benefit. I am not convinced that, apart from the case of the AstraZeneca project, public benefit has been the driver.

In Committee, I set out in some detail a case wider than this amendment for worldwide licensing arrangements based on the original amendment of my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. I remain confused by the Government’s position, which seems ever reliant on research and limited production at home, with volume production overseas. I would have thought that there are lessons to be learned about supply volatility from the case of oil from Russia. Equally, with both China and India leading the world in vaccine supply—at the same time as both countries remain reluctant to support us over certain areas of dispute and crisis in foreign policy—alarm bells should be ringing. I remain of the view that we in the United Kingdom should lead the world in this area of research, development, manufacturing, licensing and supply.

We are moving into an era of further pandemics as research-spawned accidental releases inevitably will reoccur, or perhaps they will not even be accidental in origin. There are huge foreign policy benefits to be gained arising out of being the world’s primary producer and licensee of these vaccines. When you help people, they remain indebted. That is the approach China is taking in many areas of its foreign policy.

I will give an example. The French Government funded my higher education in France 60 years ago. To this day, I remain indebted to France, with a lifetime feeling of obligation. This is often the case for foreign students. I believe that if we had been suppliers and licensees to the world over the recent period, in particular Africa and the third world, the payback would have been immeasurable, with huge implications for foreign policy.

I will exaggerate to make my case: suppose we had been supplier and licensee to China. Can noble Lords imagine what influence such beneficence would have had on Chinese public opinion and, perhaps ultimately, on Chinese foreign policy? A friend in need is a friend indeed—we should never forget that.

I appeal to the Government, even at this late stage in the current pandemic, to think long term, and create the vaccine supply, manufacturing and licensing programme that my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti is advocating. Her amendment seeks at least a temporary, time-agreed waiver. It is a start. I am using her amendment to argue a wider case, a new vision. Her excellent amendment puts in place a building block on which a longer-term strategy should be constructed. We should lead by helping others to help themselves. The rewards are inestimable.

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Lord Lexden and Lord Campbell-Savours

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I was glad to add my name to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Tyler. As my noble friend has made clear, these important amendments differ significantly from those he brought forward in Committee. My noble friend and the cross-party group that supports him have reflected and reconsidered. Our proposals have been revised, cut back and simplified. They have been discussed at some length with my noble friends Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Gardiner of Kimble. We await the Government’s response to them with interest, though not with unbounded optimism.

In their current form, the amendments are straightforward and uncomplicated. They seek above all to relate the process of recall more fully and directly to those for whom this legislation, whether we like it or not, has been devised—the electors of this country. The amendments would enable electors to exercise their judgment about the case for recall following a decision in the courts. In any worthwhile system of recall, electors should surely occupy the central position, as my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, the Conservative Party’s leading authority on the constitution, emphasised so powerfully at Second Reading and repeated today. The famous watchwords of Tory democracy spring at once to mind—“Trust the people”—sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill but in fact coined by his extraordinarily combative and pugnacious father, Lord Randolph, in 1884.

As I have mentioned before, and as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, recalled, my support for my noble friend Lord Tyler’s carefully researched and constructive initiative stems from the work done on the Bill by your Lordships’ Constitution Committee, of which I am a member. The committee’s report has featured quite prominently in our debates. Its central point, as far as these amendments are concerned, is that it expressed considerable scepticism about the wisdom of placing a recall trigger in the hands of the Standards Committee. I repeat the key passage of the report:

“The constitutional purpose of recall is to increase MPs’ direct accountability to their electorates: it is questionable whether that purpose is achieved when the trigger is put in the hands of MPs rather than constituents”.

I would add this question: do we not need to guard against the possibility that the existence of such a trigger might create dissatisfaction and disillusion among electors? If that should occur, the Bill—the purpose of which is to strengthen the electorate’s trust in the political system—could end up exacerbating the very problem it is designed to alleviate.

The committee’s report was published on 15 December. The Government’s response, received a few days ago, states that,

“it is important to be careful to respect the disciplinary arrangements of the House of Commons”.

That, of course, is a sound and overwhelmingly important principle of the internal arrangements of the House. It is not, however, obvious or self-evident that the principle should be applied to the procedures that will trigger recall, not least because of the acute danger that decisions relating to those procedures would be unduly politicised, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, argued so strongly at Second Reading.

Is there not a case for asking the House of Commons to reconsider these issues, which bear so directly and powerfully on the workings of democracy in our country, particularly in view of the new report, to which attention has been drawn this afternoon?

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I am sorry to intervene on the noble Lord. He may not have the answer to my question—I perfectly understand that—but he might be helped by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. I should really have intervened on the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. What does the noble Lord think would happen in the case of a non-declaration of interest, where there had been a repeated non-declaration of a major pecuniary interest, over a number of years, by a Member? Which committee would now decide on that matter, and to what extent does he think that that committee might be able to impose any penalty?

[Lord Lexden]

As the noble Lord suggested, I will leave that to my noble friend Lord Tyler, as a former Member of the House of Commons. However, the case for asking the House of Commons to reconsider the issues that these amendments highlight is strong. I incline to that view, and for that reason I support these amendments.