Last week the Government suffered its 15th defeat in the House of Lords on the EU Withdrawal Bill. These largely followed two broad themes - maintaining the principle of the role of Parliament in holding the Government to account without the extension of Ministerial powers through the back door, and also not reducing or removing employment or environmental regulations without proper scrutiny.
We have yet to hear when the EU withdrawal Bill will come back to Parliament. But in the meantime Parliament is leading the way in debating key and critical issues through Select Committees and opposition Day debates.
Recently I spoke in the Chamber debate on the Customs Union. I made the argument that both of the proposals from the Government - “customs partnership” and “max fac” are problematic. The customs partnership could undermine U.K. and EU tariff regimes and would leave us needing to track any goods imported where we and the EU had different tariffs. This would be hugely complex and costly over time. Businesses like Boeing who have large distribution centre in my constituency which sends parts and engineers within tight deadlines to fix planes across Europe would be sensitive to any delays at borders. The “max fac” option would inevitably need some infrastructure like cameras and would lead to a hard border in Ireland. And to top it all, neither option would be able to be in place by the end of the transition period - estimates are that a new customs system would take 3-5 years.
Our select committee last week also heard from academics and medical scientists about concerns they faced and why we needed to stay in the European Medicines Agency, which announced last year that they are leaving London with the loss of 900 jobs. I asked a question around clinical trials. Those giving evidence laid out the case very clearly the need for stability and harmonisation of regulations, and the impact on co-operation and needing an increased population in which you can do trials - 66 million not being enough for the range of demographics you may want to include in the test.
I asked if there was risk that the drugs created and reach of those products could be affected, if we have a different and more diverse population. Every country is different in its demographic make‑up. For ethnic minorities, you may need to have a much wider pool in which you are doing the research to get products that may be more effective - just as you need to reach out more widely for bone marrow transplant matches. I asked if that also a risk. The answer I received was clear - that it “potentially has an impact on which patients are being included in trials, which is a problem for individuals but also potentially for whole populations who are less well represented in mainland Europe.”
I also enquired what leaving could mean for people in Britain about access to new treatments. The Health Select Committee has done some work around this, and it would appear that, if you are not in the EU, there could be quite a significant delay, potentially six to 12 months, before you have access to new treatments and medicines.
Our witnesses outlined two elements to this. The first is that, if the UK is outside the European Medicines Agency framework for licensing drugs, our size of population is less attractive for big pharma to sell their drugs into. We are not such an attractive market and they are likely to go to the bigger markets of the EU and the US first. We certainly see in countries that are not part of those bigger markets that drugs arrive later.
There is also a relationship between where drugs are tested and trialled and where pharma will look to launch. If we are less attractive as a destination for clinical trials and have less leadership in that area, it will partly affect the way that the pharma industry sees us as a market.
As we move closer to Brexit Day, the debates become more critical and the consequences of leaving without keeping engaged with the best of what the EU offered our economy, our public services and our prosperity becomes clearer. And as the detail of the Government’s direction becomes clear, it’s vital that the widest range of voices across the country continue to be heard.
