Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 40 and 42 in my name and those of other noble Lords. I also support Amendments 39, 40A, 41, 74, 89E and 199ZA in the names of other noble Lords and to many of which I have added my own name. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, did us a great service in setting out the argument for strengthening these provisions regarding the Secretary of State’s duties on research. There is a bit of a conundrum, as he put it very well, about how a Secretary of State and indeed the NHS protects research and development in a devolved NHS. That is a difficult issue, and it is not good enough simply to have a general duty on the Secretary of State. As the noble Lord, Lord Walton, says, we need more flesh on the bone that gives some comfort to the idea that the Secretary of State, whoever he or she is, will actually take an interest and pursue some other aspects around the duty of promoting R&D. It is difficult to see how that duty could be protected without some degree of capability to intervene and ensure that the NHS pulls its weight in co-operating with R&D. I turn to Amendments 40 and 42 in my name. I speak from the background of having been for two years the Minister responsible for NHS R&D when we started the reforms of the structure of R&D in the Department of Health and the NHS to produce much more focus to the R&D programme, to streamline some of its approval processes and to improve the translation of research to clinical care—the so-called movement from the lab to the bedside. I, too, pay tribute to the work done by Dame Sally Davies—she was just plain Sally Davies in those days—and the leadership and persistence that she has shown in this area. The ideas that we were putting forward then for a National Institute of Health Research, which to some extent was based on the NIH model in the US, were not uniformly welcomed, if I may put it that way, by everyone across the NHS. It was deemed to be a bit too interventionist in some of the activities that were going on in the name of research and development in some of the dusty corners of the NHS. We have come a long way in that period. That is the background from which I speak, because I am keen to ensure that we do not go backwards in this area as we devolve more autonomy to the NHS. It is relevant that I was also a member of this House’s Science and Technology Committee, where I had the privilege of working on the inquiry into genomic medicine under the extremely skilful chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. That experience has convinced me that we need to feature R&D much more prominently in the Bill, particularly the issue of translating R&D findings into clinical practice that benefits NHS patients. That is what Amendment 40 attempts to do. However, Amendment 40 goes further in two other aspects of successful development of research findings and their application in clinical practice: the back-up of information technology and the informatics skills, which are often inadequate to back up basic scientific discoveries. One of the things that the—in my view much maligned—national programme for IT did was to make it easier for researchers to access the very important patient database that the NHS provides for them, and it makes it easier for them to collect the kind of patient samples, if I may put it as crudely as that, that they need for their research. However, the genomic medicine report also showed that we have some serious problems in this country about informatics skills in carrying forward R&D in the health and life sciences area. That is why those parts of the back-up services get a special mention in Amendment 40. I turn to Amendment 42. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, put his finger on it: if the NIHR disappears into the maw of the National Commissioning Board, how will its budget be protected? Will there not be a temptation, if times are hard, to dip into that pot and use it for operational matters such as the delivery of services? As a Minister and a civil servant who has worked in this field for many years, I can say that there is a great temptation when the going gets rough financially to—I shall put this as kindly as I can—reach into the pot of R&D, and indeed the pot of education and training, which we will be coming to later. I have watched people, who shall remain nameless, find themselves unable to resists that temptation. That is why I feel strongly that we should put something in the Bill along the lines of Amendment 42 to try to ensure good conduct. Sometimes R&D is a bit slow in spending its budget. That is quite convenient if you are running into a bit of financial difficulty during the financial year. What happens is that money gets held back because of some pressing need and it will not really matter if we take a bit longer to get on with this bit of R&D. I assure the House that I have observed a Chancellor who managed to announce the same NHS R&D budget increase in two successive Budgets, and he was not spotted by anyone in the media. It is possible for some of this ““peas under the pot”” manoeuvring to take place. We are talking about political temptation, and Amendment 42 would provide some encouragement to resist it. The temptation to dip into R&D budgets is of course not confined to the NHS, but we have an opportunity with the Bill to ensure better behaviour in the NHS regarding R&D.