Public Health England (Porton Down)

Anna Soubry Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anna Soubry)]

I should like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) on securing this debate. I also thank him for helpfully providing me and my officials with advance details of his speech. That has been of great assistance to us, because it enables us to provide answers to some of his questions and to address the many points that he has quite properly raised on behalf of the people who work at Porton and of his constituents and others who are interested in the future of the facility. I know that he is an active supporter of the work of Public Health England at Porton, and that he has worked tirelessly with Wiltshire county council and others to create a science park there. I will spend a few minutes outlining the work that Public Health England is doing on behalf of the Government to secure high-quality facilities for public health. I shall then try to respond to the points that my hon. Friend has quite properly raised.

The Government created Public Health England just a few months ago, in April 2013, with the aim of creating a national expert body charged with protecting and improving the public’s health and reducing health inequalities. The services provided at Porton are essential to the work of PHE in protecting the nation’s health and preventing disease. Porton provides some of the most specialist and high-technology microbiology facilities in the country. However, the main building at PHE Porton, as it is now known, was built 60 years ago, and the Government are committed to replacing those ageing facilities with modern state-of-the-art buildings through the submission of a revised business case some time next year.

I should add that the idea of consolidating health protection facilities on a single site to make best use of scarce skills from both Colindale and Porton is not new. What is new is the vision to develop a national centre with a much broader remit, reflecting the wider purpose of PHE to improve the public’s health and to reduce health inequalities. I understand that senior staff from PHE have met my hon. Friend about this work, as he described, and they have promised to meet him again and to engage with other interested bodies, including the county council

Let me address some of the points that my hon. Friend raised. The Government are committed to retaining some public health facilities at Porton as part of the planned science park. I know that the chief executive of Public Health England wrote a letter of support for the science park earlier this year at my hon. Friend’s request. I fully agree with my hon. Friend that it is vital to maximise the commercial potential of the services at Porton—unfortunately, that probably has not been done for some time, and the Government are absolutely committed to doing it. PHE is fully committed, too, as part of the programme on which my hon. Friend has also been briefed, and this opportunity can be grasped now. The other review is about the 15 to 20-year future for a wider range of services, currently not only at Porton, but at Colindale and elsewhere.

My hon. Friend mentions the distance between sites. The case for change that was submitted in 2011 focused on the additional benefits that can result from co-locating services on a single site. The position is not dangerous now, but there are significant opportunities for new scientific ventures and collaborations from a new national centre.

My hon. Friend asks why PHE does not simply share high-containment facilities with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. We need to be clear that although PHE and DSTL will continue to collaborate closely, PHE needs dedicated high-containment facilities to ensure that public health work can proceed in the event of the DSTL facilities being fully occupied. This will provide resilience if DSTL’s facilities are closed for any reason.

In conclusion, the Government have asked PHE to lead work on the creation of state-of-the-art facilities to protect the public’s health and to prevent disease. There is a well-established programme in place, overseen by the Department of Health and the Government’s Major Projects Authority.

It is really important to finish by stressing that Ministers have yet to make a final decision on how best to create future facilities for national public health science. PHE is on track to complete the business case for a ministerial decision by September 2014.

I hope that I have answered all the points so properly raised by my hon. Friend. If I have not answered any, he can be quite sure that I will respond in the normal manner by way of letter. My door is always open, and it would be a pleasure to meet him on any occasion to discuss this matter further and to provide any further assurances that I can to him and, perhaps most importantly, to the staff at Porton, who we would all agree do an outstanding job.

Question put and agreed to.