Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 42. I declare an obvious conflict: I am a recipient of funding from the National Institute of Health Research; I am also a senior fellow in the NIHR. We should all be very proud that huge investment has gone into research in the NHS. The reforms of the past decade have been significant. We have been used as the exemplar across the globe not just on funding but on the structure and the processes, driving research within the NHS. I should like to cover not just the health gains but the economic gains of research. Whichever way we look at it, the life science industry is worth about 4.3 per cent of our GDP. That is a significant contribution. The life science industry employs between 170,000 and 180,000 people. We are still very attractive to the pharmaceutical companies, which come here because some of the best brains are coming out of our universities. We need to work on making the NHS as attractive as the university sector. That is why safeguarding of funding within the National Institute of Health Research is vital for that important mission if we are to contribute to future economic growth. Many noble Lords have already mentioned one of the most exciting disruptive innovations around the corner: the concept of stratified, personalised medicine. The NHS in the UK is in a unique position to attract funding into that area. Having a single patient record, if we have the right informatics, the right genotype and phenotype, we can drive innovation in that very important field, which will completely transform not just healthcare but the way that we deliver healthcare in future. To do that, we need not just to incentivise the NHS with funding but make it more attractive by driving through research. It is a well known fact that there is a very strong correlation between organisations that do research and the quality of healthcare that they provide. That is well established, and that is why it is extremely important to ensure, when the Commissioning Board may be inundated with different challenges—a significant amount of effort is going into this under the leadership of Dame Sally Davies—that we maintain and protect research funding in these turbulent times as the NHS refashions itself.