Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 260, but I should like also to talk about the problem of abolishing the Health Protection Agency. I must declare an interest because at the moment my daughter is on a placement there and is most impressed by the work that she has seen. There will be a very specific problem for the Health Protection Agency if it is not completely independent, and that relates to Medical Research Council research funding. If the agency is part of the Department of Health, it will find it more difficult to secure MRC funding. That may also apply to Wellcome funding, but the problem will be particularly acute with regard to funding from the MRC, which is the highest rated funding that the agency can get. Also, as has already been said, the agency is internationally renowned and recognised for the excellence of its work and looks set to bring in more work to the UK. It is now working with the World Health Organisation on disaster planning. In planning for new disasters that might take place, it is important that countries know what other countries are going to be doing. We have sea borders, but if there is a massive disaster in another country we cannot go to its assistance if we do not know how its systems work. The Health Protection Agency is the leading body in this work on behalf of the UK. It seems very short-sighted to do anything that would destabilise this organisation. It has been suggested that it could be moved, possibly into universities. The difficulty is that the pressures of research evaluation within the university might mean that some of its research—which takes a very long-term view and may not deliver results in the very short term—would be subject to pressures that could undermine its independence. Its complete independence is essential if it is to be able to function to the standard that it currently does. It is also what you might call a very lean organisation, given that it has very high-quality research but also has people who are clinicians, who are partly involved in research and partly working out in the field; so it has some people with dual appointments, which means that they are very much planted in everyday work in the field. It has brought together people from a broad range of disciplines. It is rather interesting that the developing Francis Crick Institute is being based on the somewhat similar principle of bringing people with expert skills together under one roof to create an intellectual hothouse, to the benefit of research developments in this country. I hope the Government will think again, because they seem to be abolishing an agency and it is very difficult to see what is going to be gained by doing it.