Life Sciences

Kevin Barron Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and heartily welcome his support for the opportunities in regenerative medicine. I was fortunate enough to meet at the UK Stroke Forum last Thursday, among those exhibiting, a company that is based in England but undertaking trials and research activity in Scotland and is looking precisely at how it can use foetal-derived stem cells for regenerative purposes. The right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) talked about Pfizer. In my constituency, it has been one of the companies leading the development of new regenerative medicine techniques. That is clearly one of the areas that this country has tremendous potential in developing. The technology innovation centre for regenerative medicine was announced in the “Plan for Growth” published alongside the Budget earlier this year, and I hope that it will be one of the areas in which we will see those developments.

[Mr Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

The Health Committee, in its report on the electronic patient record, published in September 2007, stated that the highly detailed data captured had “outstanding” prospects for new and improved research, but it also asked that the best balance be found between

“the opportunity to improve access for research purposes with the ongoing need to safeguard patient privacy”.

Do the Government believe they can get that right, so that we can go ahead and use the enormous amount of data that we have in this country to improve health care for patients not just here, but throughout the world?

[Mr Lansley]

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman is here and able to ask that question, because he was the Chair of the Health Committee in September 2007, when it stated that the secondary use of data in the NHS was “vital” for the development of the NHS, including for research use. I hope that he is one of those who recognise that what we are setting out in the life sciences strategy—in particular, with the clinical practice research datalink—will enable precisely all those secondary uses for research to be developed.