Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill — House of Commons, 2016-12-06
Topic: Mixed Topics
Robert Howard Marris (Labour, Centre-left): As hon. Members know, overall I welcome the Bill, which is broadly a socialist Bill. It reinforces price controls and profit controls on big pharma, when appropriate. I always like to encourage the Conservative party, sadly now in government, to come a little further down the socialist road. They claim to be the workers’ party, and that is good New clause 1, tabled and moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), is central to what we should be talking about in many spheres of public life—namely, evidence-based policy. All too often in this House—this applies to Governments of both colours—policy appears to be made on a political whim I remember in, I think, 2008 the then Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Blackburn, Jack Straw, writing certainly to Labour MPs asking what we wanted in the Queen’s Speech that year—[Interruption.] We were in government, but perhaps he should have written to the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Sir Simon Burns). I replied, because I believe in evidence-based policy, that in that year’s Queen Speech I wanted not a single piece of legislation. I said that after 10 years of a Labour Government, I wanted Parliament to spend a year on scrutiny, looking at the legislation that we had introduced over that period to see what had worked and what had not worked To my astonishment, the Leader of the House did not accept that proposal, as those who were Members then will recall, and we had another full legislative programme. Let me add, as an aside—if you will grant me a small bit of latitude, Madam Deputy Speaker—that by the end of the Labour Government I had stopped voting on crime Bills because we had had so many. Some of them—this may have happened under the previous Conservative Government—repealed parts of earlier crime Bills introduced by a Labour Government which had never been brought into force. That was extraordinary I urge the Minister to recognise that evidence-based policy making is encouraged by new clause 1. I hope that, in the context of innovation, which was so eloquently addressed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), he will say a little about the way in which the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence operates As the Minister may know, there is an issue involving cystic fibrosis and the drug Orkambi, which NICE turned down owing to a lack of sufficient data. I understand that, because it is NICE’s job to weigh the evidence, such as it may be. The drug is registered for use in this country, but it is not available on the NHS. Since NICE decided that the cost-benefit analysis did not stack up, some long-term data from the United States, which I understand to be robust, has been made available. I gather, although I may be wrong, that NICE has not yet reviewed its decision on Orkamb, although the evidence from the United States suggests that in certain cases it can be extremely effective in treating cystic fibrosis. I hope that when we are discussing processes, innovation, efficiency and policy-based decision making, the Minister will say a little, not necessarily about Orkambi itself, but about the process whereby NICE might, in the light of new evidence, promptly—I stress the word "promptly"—review its decisions.