Science and Technology Committee — hearing of 30 June 2026: transcript & video

00:03 - 01:17

Speaker 2

Good morning, welcome to the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology. We are continuing our inquiry on innovation in the NHS, personalised medicines and AI, and we're very pleased to have as our witness this morning Lawrence Tallon, who's the Chief Executive Officer of MHRA, that's the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. So Mr Tallon, thank you very much for coming to speak to us this morning. In recent years, the MHRA has increasingly positioned itself not just as a safety watchdog, but also as a body that aims to speed up access to innovative treatments for patients in the NHS, and indeed to support the UK's life sciences sector. So by way of an opening statement, could you tell us what measures you are taking, particularly in the field of personalised medicines and AI, what measures you are taking to accelerate the adoption of innovation in the NHS?

So, over to you.

01:17 - 03:33

Speaker 1

Yes, well thank you to the committee for inviting me to speak today. And what I would say, and I'll probably try to describe the journey we've been on at the agency over the last few years, the core philosophy of the agency we describe as putting patients first, and that absolutely is our guiding star and hasn't changed. But perhaps we've started to interpret differently what we mean by putting patients first, because of course you have to have safety written through everything you do in terms of the regulation of medical of medicines and medical devices. But we believe if we want to put patients first, as well as safety, we of course also need to be thinking about expedient access to the latest medicines and medical technologies and allowing patients to benefit from innovation, of which this country is one of the leading lights, but of course many other countries too. So we think about safety and access and innovation as how we put patients first.

And the agency has had quite a difficult time over the last few years, which I think is probably well known to the committee, but I'm happy to say we're in a much, much stronger position now. A few years ago, three key things came together around and about the same time, which was firstly obviously the departure from the European Union, which was particularly disruptive to the MHRA because we were co-located with the European Medicines Agency in London. So that was a very disruptive change to the organisation, and our ability to work share across Europe was removed. Around a similar time, we of course had the COVID pandemic, which in many ways was the agency's finest hour, and I would like to pay particular tribute to my predecessor Dame June Raine, who did phenomenal work with the team at the MHRA in being the first regulator internationally to approve a vaccine for COVID-19, and I think an authoritative report recently found that that was estimated to have saved 450,000 lives in England alone. But what it meant, like many other institutions including the health service, is that all of the non-COVID work was starting to build up in the background, and our ability to share that work across Europe was diminished or removed.

The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers

Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.

The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.