The Economy

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop), a member of the ““rowdy”” Bench, perhaps better known as Snow White and what were four grumpy Members. In the current economic climate rebalancing the economy is a critical task, and I am pleased that the Government are taking urgent action in this direction. We need to create the conditions in which sectors vital to the nation's growth have the best possible chance of success. Yesterday's launch of the UK's strategy for life sciences was an important step in improving the competitiveness of life sciences and pharmaceuticals, which are vital to the UK and to the local economy in Macclesfield, where AstraZeneca employs some 2,000 people. Across the country, those sectors employ about 160,000 people and have a combined turnover of roughly £50 billion. The launch set out important positive policies for the life sciences sector: it will create new research partnerships with companies such as AstraZeneca to cut the time between the development of new treatments and their application; it will introduce a £180 million catalyst fund for the most promising medical treatments; it will reduce the time for the first recruitment of patients for clinical trials to 70 days from a staggering 600 days; it will ensure that medicines approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence are automatically approved for use in hospitals; and it will establish an early access scheme that will allow thousands of seriously ill patients to get access to cutting-edge drugs up to a year earlier than they can now. Those steps will not only help to reaffirm the competitiveness of the UK's life sciences industry, but will encourage major pharmaceutical businesses to stay based in the UK and materially help to rebalance the economy. But the approach goes further, because it will enable patients who have simply been waiting for far too long for new medicines to get them earlier. The Government are absolutely right to tackle that unacceptable situation. Our approach is not just about rebalancing the economy, because we need to rebalance our skills set too. There has never been a more important time to prepare a generation of young men and women for a future in business and enterprise.