My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, and her enormously powerful contribution. I wholeheartedly endorse her concerns
about safety and share her worry that patient safety is still not being prioritised after so many years of disaster stories. One cannot but note the gender aspects of the failure of medicine over so many decades—not listening to patients, particularly female patients. Clearly we need to make this Bill better, with a focus on safety.
The report by the noble Baroness spoke to me very personally. My late mother suffered decades ago from endometriosis. She was not listened to or taken seriously and I have been distressed and angered by hearing, just this week, reports of how difficult endometriosis patients still find it to get taken seriously and obtain the treatment they need. The noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, has done a brilliant piece of work in highlighting these issues, with a focus on particularly abusive cases.
I have been following the story of vaginal mesh with a sinking heart for some years. It is such a familiar account of vulnerable, suffering individuals being trampled over, ignored and even derided by commercial interests. “First do no harm” is, indeed, a principle that a company —every company, not just those in healthcare—should be forced to consider as a key part of its approach.
However, at this point I will speak chiefly to Amendment 59, which is in my name. I apologise for not coming in to support earlier excellent amendments, or indeed others in this group. With our small Green group juggling crucial issues tangled up in the Government’s legislative pile-up, I just did not manage to get there. I thank the small number of Peers who are carrying a huge weight in this Committee. Amendment 4, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, was particularly important, but many amendments contain constitutional and legal principles that make it a particular regret that so many potential contributors—both last week and today—are in the main Chamber. However, as I plan to speak at some length to the group starting with Amendment 18, I will be brief here.
Amendment 59 seeks to ensure that the welfare of animals is considered when making regulations about veterinary medicines. I can see that some might think that health and welfare go together, but that is not always the case, particularly in the world of factory farming and considering the context in which noble Lords are seeking, on the Agriculture Bill and Trade Bill, to defend existing veterinary and farming standards against the introduction of truly dreadful health and welfare standards from elsewhere.
There has been a tendency to use drug treatments as an alternative to decent husbandry. Animals might be protected from disease arising from miserable, crowded, inadequate conditions, but their welfare is not being protected. Any intervention should improve their welfare, not block disease caused by misery.
Animals might also be given drugs. I am thinking here particularly of the use in the United States of antibiotics, as growth promoters, and of growth hormones, which leads to animals becoming overly large—sometimes too large to move themselves around, which can be a great source of misery. We might find drugs being sought or used as sedatives to keep animals in conditions in which they would otherwise be uncontrollable or dangerous. The answer is not to drug them but to ensure proper conditions. Health and welfare must go together. That needs to be in the Bill and I hope that the Government will consider including this amendment.