As my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry pointed out, many of these bodies would like to have such a register, but they would also like to be able to guide how it should look and to have it within the existing research framework.
The Bill suggests that doctors are not already innovating, and that this is about fear of litigation. The original Bill was based on the premise that fear of litigation was stopping innovation. In fact, the position is very clear if we read what a number of bodies have said. My hon. Friend quoted some individual examples, but the vast majority of opinion from the medical community and the research community is that, genuinely, it is not fear of litigation that stops innovation. Every aspect of this Bill is based on a false premise, I am afraid. I do not want to detain the House by reading out all the various quotes on why the fear of litigation does not stop innovation, but he will know that that is the case.
We face the danger of confusing the existing legal framework. Many have expressed their concern that we will end up with a sort of Heaton-Harris defence for
those who have undertaken perhaps rather dangerous experimental treatments billed as innovation. My hon. Friend cited the case of the children who suffered from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and that is very sad, but the Bill has an underlying assumption that all innovation is a good thing whereas the lesson of history is that it can be extremely dangerous and harmful. We need to be very careful about what we mean by innovation, and to accept that there are also very dangerous innovations. If, as a result of this well-intentioned Bill, we inadvertently end up with people being, in effect, experimented on by irresponsible doctors who are able to get off scot-free, we will have to come back to this place and amend it.
I would like to give my hon. Friend an example based on the case of somebody from my constituency who wrote to me to say that he was concerned that the Government were not doing enough with regard to experimental treatments. His specific example was a bogus treatment called GcMAF. The company promoting this entirely bogus treatment—it has a number of clinics in Europe and Guernsey—is very concerned that it cannot use it in this country because it is prevented from doing so by the current legislative environment. Well, jolly good. It puts out literature saying
“we state that if you have terminal stage 4…cancer, have not had chemotherapy, and you do the GcMAF protocol, you have an 80% chance of being cancer free in a year.”
That is the kind of claim that such doctors put out. In other words, the company is not only promoting its own product, but actively discouraging people from having a treatment that could help.