I begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for selecting this very important topic for debate this afternoon. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) for the passionate
but very thoughtful way in which she introduced the debate. I endorse everything that she said. On the drug Kadcyla, she said, quite pithily, that, first, it works and, secondly, it has far fewer side effects than many other cancer drugs. I was also very proud to have backed the 43p-a-day campaign that she mentioned.
I declare an interest as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on off-patent drugs and should also say that one of my first actions as a Member of this House in 2015 was to become a breast cancer ambassador. I was very proud to do that, as the person who inspired me to come into politics, my grandmother, died of the disease some years ago.
I was lucky enough in my early months in this House to be drawn in the ballot for a private Member’s Bill. I introduced the Off-patent Drugs Bill, and although it was talked out in quite controversial circumstances on 6 November 2015, I was none the less pleased after that to work on a cross-party basis to achieve legislative progress. I pay tribute to the hon. Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) and for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), and to the former Minister for Life Sciences, the hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), for the work that was done in those months to make legislative changes which were incorporated in the Access to Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill, which became an Act and received Royal Assent in March last year.
I want to come to the pledges that were made on 29 January 2016 and how things have moved forward since. I say to the Minister that in setting out a number of questions about this matter, I do not necessarily expect them all to be answered in detail in her closing remarks. If there are aspects that she feels she cannot answer in detail, I would be grateful if she wrote to me about them after the debate.
On 29 January 2016, I and others in the House tabled a package of amendments to the Access to Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill. Some were substantial and went into the Bill. Others were probing amendments designed to extract the promises that I have talked about. The then Minister for Life Sciences said:
“Broadly, the intention of the package of amendments is to introduce off-label repurposed medicines in the Bill, and to put it four square at the heart of the agenda.”
That is precisely what we sought to do that day. He added:
“I wholeheartedly supported the intention of his Bill and its predecessor, but not the mechanism. We now have a mechanism that will work”—
we had spoken that day about the mechanism.
One of the amendments requested an action plan, but the Minister decided he did not want that on the face of the Bill. However, he said:
“let me set out my commitment and that of the Government to pursuing this agenda with time and rigour.” —[Official Report, 29 January 2016; Vol. 605, c. 543.]