My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, is to be congratulated on bringing these amendments to the forefront of our discussions and considerations, not least because, as he said, at the heart of them is an attempt to guarantee patient safety. That should be a paramount reason for giving them the active consideration we are.
As the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, said, there is a significant value to NHS data for a number of reasons: expanding research, testing technology, better under- standing of diseases and, of course, improving treatments. The fiscal value of NHS data cannot be underlined
strongly enough—imagine its value if an insurance company were to find, for instance, access to data concerning test, track and trace.
The value of all this data is estimated to be around £10 billion a year, but, as I have mentioned before, the Bill in its current form could allow UK data to be moved to servers in America and stop the NHS being able to analyse its own health data without paying royalties. We should not pretend that tech companies and US drug giants do not recognise the value of all this data; the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has given ample voice to that argument.
Last year, it was revealed that pharma companies Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly paid the Government for licences costing up to £330,000 each, in return for anonymised health data. The Government, as has been said earlier, have also given Amazon access to healthcare information, and DeepMind was given access to the data of 1.6 million patients at the Royal Free Hospital.
As we have touched on before in a previous group, Labour supports protecting the NHS, including its data and publicly funded health and care services, from any form of control from outside the UK in trade deals. I have already pulled out the inconsistencies in the Government’s position. They say the NHS is not on the table in trade talks, but they will not put protections on the face of the Bill. What have they got to hide? They do not want to improve scrutiny mechanisms for trade agreements, and I think we should be concerned and highly worried about that.
I am not the only one to recognise this: more than 400 doctors and health professionals have urged the Government to amend the Bill and ensure that health services are not on the table in future trade deals. They have also argued that free trade deals risk compromising the safe storage and processing of NHS data. Let us commit in statute to protecting our beloved NHS in trade deals and making sure we can use valuable data to provide the most cutting-edge care for patients here in the UK.
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