The amendments seek to remove the part of the Bill that sought to take forward the original proposals put forward by Lord Saatchi to provide reassurance to clinicians that fear of negligence should not be a barrier to innovation. I want to say something about the Government’s position on this point, which, as the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) has said, has been a point of some contention.
The Government share the ambition that fear of negligence should not be a barrier to innovation. Indeed, we have looked carefully at the provisions of the original Saatchi Bill and of this Bill, and taken legal advice in order to be sure that the proposed mechanism would in no way have changed medical negligence law, and that is indeed the case. Notwithstanding that, I have also repeatedly made it clear that if the Bill’s provisions were to create confusion, undermine patient, public and clinician trust and confidence and trigger a lawyer-fest of discussion about whether the mechanism did or did not have that effect, it would have had the opposite effect to that which it was seeking. In those circumstances, the Bill could trigger more confusion about medical negligence.
My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) has done a sterling job in the past few months to get round all the various parties and reassure them that, in law, the proposed mechanism did not change the legal framework for medical negligence. However, as he himself has candidly said, such as been the level of opposition—and indeed some misunderstanding, not least because there are three Bills on this subject in the House—that this proposal has started to have the opposite effect. As I said on Second Reading and elsewhere, we would never be able to support a Bill which, despite its intentions, undermined public and patient trust and confidence in our world-class medical and clinical research landscape. The fact that a coalition of lawyers, clinicians, patients and charities was concerned about the clause meant that it would inevitably have to be removed if the Bill was to receive any support from the Government. I congratulate my hon. Friend on doing his very best to develop the debate and, in the end, deciding that it would be better to remove the clause and focus on the areas on which there is agreement.
In accepting the amendments that remove the provisions on medical negligence from the Bill, it is worth pointing out that I do not want the hon. Member for Lewisham East to misrepresent my position on this. Both the chief medical officer and the NHS medical director had advised us that they believed the proposal was safe, and we had no fear that it would in any way endanger patient safety. The point is that if it triggers legal, political or patient concern, it is self-defeating.
As I have said repeatedly at the Dispatch Box, fear of negligence is just one concern in a whole field of barriers to the adoption of innovation. I do not believe that it is the biggest barrier; I never have. The biggest is the difficulty of getting information to clinicians on the busy frontline of our national health service on the pace,
scale and volume of innovative medicines that are coming through the system. That is why I believe that my hon. Friend’s refocusing the Bill on that, and on the introduction of a new mechanism for getting information on off-label drugs and innovative medicines in development, is very helpful and powerful.
In the consultation on the previous Bill on this subject, we received some evidence from clinicians that there was an issue about fear of negligence. Indeed, some Members have talked about the scale of the negligence bill that now confronts the NHS every year. I want to put on record, notwithstanding my earlier comments, that it is absolutely right to remove this mechanism from the Bill because it is having the opposite effect. There is an issue in our system, and we need to ensure that doctors and clinicians are not operating under the sword of Damocles because of the fear of negligence. It is equally important that patients should know that the system is there to protect them, and we do not want them to fear that medical negligence provisions are being undermined in any way. I strongly welcome the removal of this clause, but in so doing I do not want the hon. Member for Lewisham East to misrepresent our position by saying that we accepted that the mechanisms were in any way dangerous. Patient safety has always been our No. 1 concern.