My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, set the tone for this debate. I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath; his concerns should concern us all. We are entering new territory. We have worked across an EU framework for a long time and are now going to be on our own. We need to work out policies and procedures to deal with this new landscape, which of course is what we are doing today. However, we will still have to work with Europe, if not within it.
I understand that we are to leave on 31 December, but we really must not bury our heads in the ground. Regulation will be key; mutual recognition is important. I think the Minister has referred to mutual recognition in the past. I wonder if he or the noble Baroness, Lady Penn—I am not sure who will be summing up—could clarify that issue. We need easy and ready access to new medicines, early-phase trials and the willingness of the NHS to take them up. There is also the role of NICE. We have not looked at mutual
recognition of standards, but we need to share information with international partners. My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones asked a lot of pertinent questions. If the Minister does not have these issues in her brief, perhaps we might have either a letter or a meeting, because these are really meaty issues that we are discussing.
Amendment 27 would make provision to enable the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to work with other regulators to minimise delay so that the UK can get early access to new medicines. Amendment 45 would require the Secretary of State to publish their proposed regime for a list of fees in respect of human medicines. What is the timescale on that? It would be interesting to see this fees regime alongside the old regime that we will be leaving.
Government Amendments 48 and 66 relate to the disclosure of information in accordance with international agreements. My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones had something to say about that. Interestingly, although I am not absolutely clear, Labour’s Amendment 118 aims to protect medicines and medical devices regulations from any form of control from outside the UK in the event of a trade deal. This goes back to legislation that we dealt with, which I think we ended up renaming the international health Bill. We need to be clear, coming up to the end of the year, about what a trade deal might actually look like and what things would look like without a trade deal. Those are my reflections on the amendments.