My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Because this is about devices, I should remind the Committee that I am president of GS1 UK, the barcoding association, and chair of the advisory board of TenX Health.
I thought the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, posed a very interesting question about whether NHS patients have less access to innovative new medical devices than those in other European countries. My gut feeling is that they do, but I agree that the more information we can obtain the better so that we can debate whether the fund that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, proposed is a good way forward. On the face of it, I think it is. We have a situation in this country that is rather the case for medicines, where we have a very important health technology and medical devices sector. The ABHI informed me recently that the health technology industry employs over 127,000 people, generating a turnover of £24 billion. That is very substantial.
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We also know from another briefing from the former chief executive of the BHTA, Ray Hodgkinson, that many companies in the devices sector, alongside the technology companies, have found the NHS very frustrating to deal with. There have been a number of initiatives in the past. One of the most recent is the HealthTech Connect portal, but my understanding is that very few companies indeed have got through that portal. The fact is that companies find the UK to have a very bureaucratic approach to deciding whether it will invest in innovative new devices. Other countries are more attractive and less bureaucratic.
I think the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, put his finger on it: there is a difference in the sense that the NHS is funded almost entirely out of funds voted by Parliament. Inevitably, money is constrained in a way that it does not seem to be in insurance and social insurance systems. In our highly centralised system, it seems the rewards are for those NHS bodies that constrain expenditure. One can see why, but the problem is that, as in medicines, it leads to a philosophy that sees new innovation as expensive and to be avoided almost at all costs. We end up with a very difficult situation where we have fantastic innovation in technology and devices, just as we do in medicines, but the NHS is very poor at taking advantage of those new developments and inventions.
In a letter the Minister sent out yesterday, which commented on our previous debate, which the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, referred to when we talked about funds for new medicines, he talked about the effort the Government are making to increase procurement of medical devices that have received positive assessment from NICE. He then referred to the medtech funding mandate, due to be launched in April 2021, which will ensure that specified NICE-approved, cost-saving, innovative devices are funded locally. That is very welcome indeed, but I have to say that one’s whole experience of this is that it is likely to be a very bureaucratic process. Companies will have to go through endless stages and many will lose heart. This is a major problem and why the fund proposed by noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, may well be a different, faster approach. One thing is for sure: in the global world in which we operate, the UK has a fantastic health technology and medical devices sector, but we really do need to ensure that the NHS does its best to support it and that NHS patients get the benefit of what it is achieving.