My Lords, it is a great pleasure to support the noble Lord, Lord Clement -Jones, and my noble friend Lady Thornton. I urge the Minister to respond, as the noble Lord asked, on how Clause 3 will actually be used. It did not help that the Explanatory Notes made no mention of what the noble Lord described tonight and at Second Reading as “legislative creep”.
We have had submissions from a number of organisations that make the point that the wording goes beyond the current EU legislation, which was carefully implemented after extensive consultation with the relevant bodies. That is from the Company Chemists’ Association. The ABPI said that the falsified medicines directive was introduced as a barrier to counterfeit and falsified medicines entering the supply chain, thus reducing the potential risk of harm to patients, that the ABPI and its members have worked to fund and implement the falsified medicines directive, and that any future considerations under this clause must include full consultation with industry.
So there is general concern in the industry about how the clause will be used. We know that the department already has access to a wide range of data on medicines sales and use in the UK under the Health Service Products (Provision and Disclosure of Information) Regulations. Given this and the known sensitivities around falsified medicines data, I am still unclear why the department wants to extend the purposes for which data is collected under a future UK system. I know that we were very privileged—