GSK boss Emma Walmsley has fired a parting shot at Labour, saying that its refusal to back down in a drug pricing row puts the UK’s ‘globally competitive’ industry under threat.
Walmsley, who announced last week she would quit GlaxoSmithKline in three months, became the latest to speak out over a pricing regime that has infuriated the pharmaceutical sector.
Under the rules, designed to save the public money, the NHS claws back up to 23 per cent of the cost of newer drugs that it has bought from pharma firms.
This rate is much higher than what was anticipated when the regime was introduced in 2024. It is also much more than what is clawed back under similar schemes in other countries.
It has prompted companies to warn of lower investment in the UK, and suggest that British patients could find it harder to access cutting-edge medicines.
Pharma firms argue that too tight a squeeze on their profits reduces the incentive for them to spend years and large sums of cash on drug development.
Speaking out:Â GSK boss Emma Walmsley has fired a parting shot at Labour
‘It will be very difficult for the UK to have a life sciences industry that is globally competitive without a competitive commercial environment,’ Walmsley told The Mail on Sunday.
‘I think it’s absolutely essential that we continue to have constructive relationships between industry and the Government.
‘We also need constructive industrial policies, constructive healthcare policies.’
Walmsley said she recognised the Government had a ‘difficult job’ but stressed that – at a time when the Government says it is prioritising growth – ‘all the data shows the health of the nation impacts the wealth of the nation’.
Stand-off: Health Secretary Wes Streeting walked away from talks with an industry group after it failed to agree to new Government proposals
‘We need to make this a good place to launch innovation with fair value recognition,’ she said.
‘I hope and I hear that we can continue to be in dialogue to get to a more constructive resolution. I do believe we’re better placed between industry and Government to address these things by working together.’
The comments come as the Government and industry remain locked in a stand-off over the drugs pricing policy.
In August, Health Secretary Wes Streeting walked away from talks with an industry group after it failed to agree to new Government proposals.
He has said he ‘won’t allow big pharma to rip off our patients or taxpayers’. In recent weeks however, Whitehall has struck a more emollient tone.
Lord Patrick Vallance, the Science Minister, told the Financial Times in September that Britain needed to ‘fix the commercial environment’ to bring companies back and benefit patients and that ‘means probably for medicines, we need to pay a bit more for some of them’.Â
It comes after several firms pulled out of or paused investments in the sector. Last month, US drugs giant Merck said Britain was ‘not internationally competitive’ as it scrapped a £1 billion London research centre that was already under construction and due to open in 2027, resulting in 125 scientists and support staff being laid off.
And David Ricks, the boss of Eli Lilly – maker of fat jab Mounjaro – also sounded a warning to the UK after the firm paused plans for an investment to help fund new biotech companies.
Ricks said Britain paid less for drugs than other developed countries and ‘unless that changes, I don’t think they will see many new medicines and
I don’t think they will see much investment’.
He told the FT that Britain was ‘probably the worst country in Europe’ for drug prices.
Meanwhile, UK-based drugs giant AstraZeneca has paused a planned £200 million expansion of its Cambridge research site.
The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry has highlighted figures showing that a ‘remarkably low’ 9 per cent of total healthcare expenditure in the UK goes on medicine, compared with 15 per cent in France, 17 per cent in Germany and Italy, and 18 per cent in Spain.
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