I thank the hon. Member for making an excellent point. The APPG has done astonishing work over the past few years in support of this, but yes, the Government could do so much more for those families who know what it is like to get to the end of every month, and of every prescription, and face the huge bills of which he spoke—up to £2,000 a month. The strain and financial burden of that is all on the families. Surely that is not how any of us in this place anticipated it would be or wanted it to be.
When the then Home Secretary agreed that medicinal cannabis would be legal for use in the United Kingdom, I think we all believed that parents would no longer be forced to watch their children suffer, knowing that a treatment was available. What has happened since is heartbreaking. In the intervening years, they have been forced to source medication themselves, sometimes travel abroad—again at huge cost—to collect it, challenge the medical authorities and face rejection and repeated appeals for NHS prescriptions.
Surely no one in this place wants even to contemplate what it would mean to have a loved one—husband, wife, partner, brother, sister, friend or child—who had to pay for the medication they needed simply to go on with day-to-day life. Think of the diabetic without insulin or the asthmatic without an inhaler; this is no different, but it is new. With so much red tape and inflexible guidelines, too many people face being left alone, helpless and simply unable to afford life-changing treatment. In fact, since November 2018, just three NHS prescriptions have been issued for the type of medicinal cannabis that is life-transforming for these children.
Clearly, guidelines are not empowering medical professionals to do the job they want to do and provide the best possible care for their patients, knowing that they have the establishment’s support. Critics often point to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and say it has restricted medicinal cannabis, but only a few months ago it said that there was no ban and that prescriptions should be done on a case-by-case basis. Still parents are told that the medical profession does not have the confidence to prescribe the medication because of a lack of evidence and that clinical randomised control trials are needed. However, that will not work, because this medication does not come in a standard dosage and the balance of ingredients needs to be changed to suit individual patients. Even if medical trials did work, they would be of no use to those children who are already benefiting from medicinal cannabis. Trials would be both unethical and unsafe, because those children would have to stop taking the medicine that is working for them, perhaps for a placebo, and risk a return of life-threatening seizures.