Dementia: Fuelling the Moonshot

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Kamall) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for securing this important debate. On a personal note, I thank her for the time she took earlier this week to discuss some of her priorities and experiences with me. I think we all know people—family or others—who have experienced dementia, so we have seen it first-hand. As we look at our ageing society, as we get old and the medical technology gets better at keeping us living physically longer, one of the issues that we will face more and more is dementia and Alzheimer’s.

I know that all noble Lords will pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross—indeed, they have done—as a co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Dementia. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken so well today and conveyed such emotion and facts in such a short time. I am sure all noble Lords would like to express our thanks to the APPG on Dementia and to all those who contributed to the report for all the work that they put into the inquiry.

The recommendations in the report are incredibly timely since the Government are developing our new dementia strategy. The strategy will set out plans for dementia in England for future years, including our ambitions for dementia research. We will work closely with patients, researchers, funders and charities to incorporate things from the report into the development of the strategy.

I now turn to the central recommendation within the APPG report which is for the Government to deliver the dementia moonshot. As the report sets out, the Conservative Party’s manifesto committed to doubling funding for dementia research and delivering a moonshot. The moonshot will expand the UK’s internationally leading research effort to understand the mechanisms underlying the development and progression of dementia, deliver new therapies, enable people to live better with dementia, and look at ways to help prevent the condition.

We remain committed to supporting research into dementia and UK researchers are at the forefront of global efforts. The Government spent nearly £420 million on dementia research from 2015-16 to 2019-20. This was significantly ahead of our commitment to spend £300 million in this period, as set out in the Challenge on Dementia 2020.

We know that we need to go further to accelerate progress against this condition—progress towards the moon, if you like. However, increasing research spend takes time. One of the things I hear when talking to others about increasing research is that capacity building cannot be done at the press of a button. In addition, as I am sure noble Lords appreciate, in the current Parliament, the research system has been diverted to help combat the global pandemic, with all hands on deck and everyone focused on that.

In 2019-20, the most recent year for which spending figures are available, the Government spent over £75 million on dementia and neurodegeneration research. We have committed to maintaining at least this baseline level of spending, which equates to spending £375 million over the next five years.

The £5 billion investment in health-related research and development announced in the 2021 spending review reflects the Government’s commitment to supporting research into the most pressing health challenges of our time. Clearly, dementia is way up that list. We are working across government to finalise the outcomes from the spending review and identify ways to significantly boost research on dementia to support the delivery of the moonshot. I am, and will be, speaking to colleagues across government about achieving this.

In the meantime, rather than just waiting, we have been taking positive actions so that we can prepare the ground. This includes the launch of a highlight notice on dementia within the National Institute for Health Research. This invites ambitious dementia research applications and signals to the community that dementia is a priority area for the NIHR. I am encouraged that dementia researchers are coming forward with proposals in response.

This Government are committed to supporting dementia research across the translational pathway, from basic science, to understanding the causes of disease, through to applied research on treatments, care and quality of life, as well as public health prevention. Through the UK Dementia Research Institute, scientists have made huge leaps in understanding the mechanisms underlying disease progression, and researchers have developed potential new diagnostics and treatments.

The Dementias Platform UK has established technology-based networks to better understand how dementia starts and to support experimental medicine studies. In partnership with the Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK, people with dementia and their carers continue to be recruited, via Join Dementia Research, to take part in a range of important research. Through our NIHR research, we are supporting high-quality studies on lifestyle prevention, service provision, care and care technology.

I will now cover the specific questions rightly raised by noble Lords. The Government are committed to delivering on dementia research as much as possible; I am sure noble Lords understand the hiatus due to the focus on Covid. As we continue to look at Covid—although not necessarily beyond it; it may be with us for some time and we may well be looking at annual boosters, for example, and managing Covid in the same way that we manage flu—it is important that we consider how we deliver the dementia moonshot. We are discussing across government a timetable for the delivery of this as well as the timetable for doubling the funding. Increasing research takes time and, as noble Lords will understand, a lot of stuff has been diverted to help combat the global pandemic. However, we will set out plans for dementia, including research, for future years.

We also recognise that Covid-19 has caused problems across the sector and many researchers, including dementia researchers, are considering leaving academic research—as noble Lords pointed out—due to the financial uncertainties created by the pandemic. I assure noble Lords that Ministers and government officials have been liaising closely with medical research charities to understand the impact of the pandemic, identify how we can work together and ensure that patients benefit from charity-funded research. Most recently, BEIS and the DHSC have announced a £20 million support package, which will support early-career researchers funded by charities, helping to protect the pipeline of talented researchers who play an important role in delivering patient-saving research.

The report contains a recommendation to maximise the success of the Join Dementia Research platform. I assure noble Lords that increasing participation in all types of research is incredibly important, as part of our life sciences vision and of global Britain. As set out in the UK vision for clinical research delivery, our ambition is to ensure that the UK has the most advanced and data-enabled clinical research environment in the world.

This plays to my portfolio and two of my priorities. One is digitisation and sharing data, and the second is ensuring, across government, that the UK is a hub for life sciences. That includes research, trials and medical studies. We will build on digital platforms like Join Dementia Research to improve our ability to recruit patients to studies and ensure that participating in research is as easy as possible.

The NHS is one of the most trusted organisations in the UK, and our priority is to ensure the highest standards of data transparency and accountability. Only today I was on a call with an individual who has been helping us make sure we have trusted research environments, so that people can be confident about their data being shared appropriately.

The APPG report recommends that we move Join Dementia Research to an opt-out model, but this would not meet the standards or patient expectations around how our data is used. However, we are building on complementary platforms such as NHS DigiTrials to support the best use of data to facilitate recruitment to clinical trials. Join Dementia Research will play a key role alongside this development to ensure that all potentially eligible participants are invited to participate in studies relevant to them.

Noble Lords mentioned the Life Sciences Vision that we published on 6 July 2021. It set out our commitment to improve translational capabilities in this research, so that new treatments reach patients faster. We are looking at ways to continue to make funding available for dementia research through UK Research and Innovation and the NIHR.

We support dementia research by funding a range of ground-breaking research. Besides the NIHR, the Medical Research Council supports dementia research across the discovery and translational pathway. Through the UK Dementia and Research Institute, significant advances are being made in understanding disease mechanisms. The Dementias Platform UK, a unique public-private partnership, has established a technology-based network. Also, the Medical Research Council funds longitudinal population cohorts, which provide opportunities for dementia researchers to exploit data-driven science—for example, through the UK Biobank, which provides by far the world’s largest programme for genotyping and brain-body imaging.

We recognise that Covid-19 has caused problems across the sector and for many medical charities, which we recognise are a vital part of this. I reassure noble Lords—even if I have said it before—that we are liaising with medical research charities to understand the challenges they face, and to help them through it.

Government responsibility for delivering dementia research is shared between my department, the Department of Health and Social Care, with research delivered by the NIHR, and BEIS, with research delivered by UK Research and Innovation. In 2019-20, the NIHR spent £29 million on dementia research, and UKRI spent £46.7 million. The charities Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK are also funders of dementia research. We are working in partnership with those two charities, and with the UK Dementia Research Institute, which is a significant part of the ecosystem.

A number of noble Lords raised the issue of early diagnosis. We support a range of issues in this important area. For example, at the UK Dementia Research Institute, scientists are trialling technologies such as cameras and sensors to detect dementia earlier. Dementias Platform UK is undertaking research on wearable devices which can monitor the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, and the NIHR recently launched the £9 million programme that we talked about.

During our one-to-one conversation, and in the debate tonight, the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, mentioned arts-based interventions. I know that I will be facing an OPQ on this. As I have mentioned before, as an amateur musician—let me stress “amateur”—I say that we all know the role that music plays and the way it touches our hearts as well as our minds. There is no better buzz or thrill than being a live musician, playing in front of a live audience and seeing them respond. When I say “respond”, I mean hopefully in a positive way. In fact, you see how people feed off each other, and that energy helps you connect with people. It touches hearts and minds, affects your mood and quite often helps unlock people. It is a way of people expressing themselves in a way that they would not do ordinarily.

We understand that arts-based interventions such as music therapy can play an important role, along with social prescribing, which is currently being rolled out across the NHS for local agencies. We will set out some of these plans in future years. Let me give a couple of examples of projects we are working on. The MARQUE project, jointly funded with the ESRC, is looking at care home staff and non-drug treatments for agitation in people with dementia; the WHELD programme is helping the well-being of people with dementia living in care homes; and there is the IDEAL project.

I am sorry that I have overrun in my enthusiasm for arts-based subjects. There are other issues that I wanted to touch on, including capacity building. But let me end by saying this: we need to continue to build on our success to accelerate progress in dementia research, but we cannot do this alone, especially when there are so many experts among noble Lords and across government, but outside government as well. By working across government, co-operating with charities and the research community, and recruiting people with dementia, we hope to bring forward ambitious plans in our new dementia strategy.

House adjourned at 8.02 pm.