My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and my noble friend Lord Patel have very eloquently spoken to these amendments. They are incredibly important, and I strongly support them. We have to protect the NHS and publicly funded healthcare services across the UK from any control from outside the UK. To do otherwise would cost us dearly and would, in the end, prevent us looking after our own, because we would be told what to do from outside.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has shown, all aspects of the NHS and social care must be protected from trade agreements at every level. We need to maintain the option of reversing the privatisation which has already occurred, if that is what we decide to do in the future, and we must be free to create collaborative health and social care. Trade agreements must not drive us into some kind of locked-in increased privatisation of the NHS or, indeed, force any such change in the devolved nations. The health and social care sectors must be excluded from the scope of all future trade agreements, otherwise we will find that the NHS is irretrievably undermined.
On maintaining quality, we are world leaders in pharmaceutical research and development, yet access does not always match innovation. The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry has pointed out that in the first year of a new medicine being launched, only one-fifth of eligible patients in the UK get access compared to those in France and Germany. Our ability to regulate and maintain the quality and safety of medicines and medical devices must not be undermined by some small sub-paragraph in a trade agreement that slips by almost unnoticed.
In addition, medicines and medical devices must remain affordable in the UK. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society highlighted the huge extra cost to the NHS after Essential Pharma disclosed plans to cease production of Priadel, its cheapest lithium carbonate product,
due to restrictions on permitted pricing. The suggested alternatives for bipolar disorder owned by the same company can cost at least 10 times as much.
So this is not only about who runs the NHS today. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, our NHS databases are extremely valuable. They are a resource for our future research and development and, from that, for our future economic development. If we lose them through a trade agreement, we will irretrievably damage our future economic development.
I now turn briefly to Amendment 75, which ensures that the Government can uphold the right of citizens to access medicines under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as part of the right to the highest attainable standard of healthcare. Modern free trade agreements are used increasingly as vehicles to further pharmaceutical industry interests ahead of public health needs. They increasingly include clauses on intellectual property, pharmaceutical regulatory processes and investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms that affect price and decrease access to medicines. To secure affordable access to medicines, the Government must be able to grant compulsory licences, deal with exhausted intellectual property rights, strengthen patentability criteria and determine what constitutes a national emergency, as laid out in subsection (3) of the proposed new clause. The Covid pandemic has shown why we must always be able to make technologies available quickly, widely and at the lowest cost. As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, pointed out, generics are not always cheaper in a complex market that can easily be manipulated.
Our NHS database is extremely valuable, and its value is increasing. It cannot be thrown away. There are times when short-term industry profits are not good for patients and delay access to affordable medicines and health technologies. These amendments aim to secure our healthcare for the future. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Fox, that informed patient consent requires a patient to know whether data is held, what it is used for and how it can be manipulated, even when it is anonymised. They would rightly be outraged if that data is allowed to put profits in the pockets of other countries, knowing that it will never be ploughed back into the NHS—certainly not at 100%.