I will not detain the House for long. I know that that normally means the start of a very long speech, but I will be very brief. I declare an interest as the chair of the all-party group on diabetes and as a type 2 diabetic.
I welcome the proposals put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) from the Labour Front Bench. I hope the Government accept them. They are reasonable proposals designed to look at the impact of the Act and ensure it achieves what it hopes to achieve. That is not always the case with legislation.
There is a lot of agreement on the Bill, and the Minister should be commended for how he has introduced it. The reason for the Bill is the ever-rising cost of drugs to the national health service. We know of the work done by The Times in particular. It is always a battle for diabetics, especially when we meet in informal circumstances, as happened last week when the new report of the all-party group was launched by the Secretary of State for Health. I think the Minister was due to come—I may have gone before he arrived. [Interruption.] He is nodding. [Interruption.] No, he didn’t come. I am sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. I know you do not like Members tempting sedentary interventions. But certainly the presence of the Secretary of State and departmental officials was very helpful to the all-party group.
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Our concern is the ever-increasing cost of diabetes drugs to the NHS. As the House knows, diabetes complications cost the NHS 10% of its budget—a huge amount of money—while the drugs bill is about £900 million. The problem is the desire of local GPs to prescribe drugs instead of looking for alternatives. That is why I support the duty to promote innovation in subsection (1)(c) of the new clause. This is extremely important as far as diabetes is concerned. Exactly one week ago, at the invitation of the Steno centre in Denmark and the Leicester diabetes centre, one of the foremost diabetes centres in the country—I pay tribute to Professors Heather Daly, Kamlesh Khunti and Melanie Davies—I spoke at a conference in Copenhagen on innovation. The NHS innovating, as proposed in subsection (1)(c), will result in a reduction in the overall cost of the drugs budget.
When I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, the first thing my GP did was put me on metformin. My mother had diabetes before me. There is usually a family history—not always and not in respect of type 1 diabetes, but certainly in respect of families from the south Asian community, though of course diabetes affects all communities. My mother had it, but I was not aware of what it meant, because at the time I was Minister for Europe and flying around better integrating Britain into the EU—unlike 15 years later when all that has changed—and I never had the opportunity to sit down with my mother, who subsequently died, and find out more about what diabetes meant. Unfortunately, most families fail to do that. As a result, my diabetes was caught very late, exactly 10 years ago.
Had I been told by my doctor, “I’m not putting you on tablets. You’re not going on metformin. I’m going to send you off to the gym. I’m going to prescribe gym for an hour, and you’re going to walk for an hour, and you’re going to make these kinds of lifestyle changes,”
I might not have stopped the type 2 diabetes affecting me, but perhaps I could have delayed its onset, and in the long run I would have saved the taxpayer a huge amount of money. That is why innovation is so vital to what is being proposed. Innovation permits so much to be done to reduce the cost to the taxpayer. I know that that is not all the Government aim to do in the Bill, but it is a big chunk of it. If we can reduce the huge amount of taxpayers’ money spent on drugs and given to pharmaceutical companies, in the long term it will help the taxpayer.