My Lords, I add my thanks and congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, on tabling this amendment. He has been a consistent, determined, passionate and highly effective advocate for sufferers of mesothelioma and this is one more instance of his very good work. I was happy to sign the letter that he initiated to the Times but there was no room left for me to add my name to the amendment.
It is profoundly desirable that more funds should be invested in research in this field. It is good that the industry, spurred by the British Lung Foundation, has already contributed £3 million and even better that it has stated its willingness to contribute more, provided that the state provides what the industry would regard as an acceptable contribution, which I guess means more than match funding.
I would be grateful if the Minister or the noble Lord, Lord Alton, could cast some light on why we have not yet seen a greater volume of state-funded research in this field. The Department of Health and the NHS have very large budgets for research; the business department has a substantial budget enabling it to fund the Medical Research Council; and there is no lack of public funding available to be applied in this area.
The normal principle is that those to whom decisions on the use of state-provided funds for research are entrusted look to receive high quality research applications. Surely such high quality research applications must
have been coming. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, spoke, in some sense, on behalf of University College London, where there is an important programme of research in the field of cancer. He also alluded to the Sanger Institute at Cambridge. If we are talking about academic institutions of the highest quality willing to commit themselves to work in this field, it is a puzzle to me why they have not been able to obtain more of the funds that the state provides for research. It may be that not enough appropriate proposals for research have yet been formulated, but I am puzzled about that and I would be grateful if the Minister would cast some light on it.
Perhaps he is going to say that the DWP, which itself has a substantial research budget, will be willing to find additional money to earmark in this direction. However, even the DWP probably insists on quite high quality in its research, so the same constraints might apply. However, those constraints should not be meaningful in this area. We are talking about a subset of the broad field of cancer research. There is an abundant willingness to fund it. I really want to know why it has not happened. Of course, I hope that it will and I hope that this amendment, whether or not it is modified as the Bill proceeds, will be the means to opening up a greater flow of funding towards mesothelioma from the state as well as the industry and perhaps also the charitable sector.
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