The Therapeutic Products Bill is one of those pieces of legislation that requires a fair bit of panel-beating in a select committee, and even then not everyone's happy with its shape.
In the words of one MP recently when talking about how select committees work, sometimes bills come before the committee and they need very little work before going back to the House, while others need quite a bit of panel-beating.
In the latter category we can easily fit the Therapeutic Products Bill which this week passed its second reading. The Health Select Committee which examined the legislation digested a vast amount of public submissions taking issue with the Bill. This in turn has informed a robust debate between MPs.
Health Minister Ayesha Verrall
The Government bill - which provides a new regulatory framework for therapeutic products (medicines, medical devices, natural health products, and active pharmaceutical ingredients) - is a useful example of how legislation gets shaped through a rigorous select committee process.
Submissions
Over 16-thousand submissions were received. Oral hearings were held in late March and 210 organisations and 127 individual submitters were heard. The vast majority of submitters were opposed to aspects of the Bill. The Health Minister Ayesha Verrall acknowledged this during her second reading speech.
"I recognise that many people who submitted on the bill were opposed to it or had concerns about how it would affect them, their whānau, or their businesses. Over 9,000 submissions focused on the inclusion of natural health products (NHPs) and called for their exclusion from the bill or that they be regulated in a risk-proportionate way. I also acknowledge that more than 700 submitters expressed concerns about the bill's potential effect on rongoā Māori (traditional healing ways)."
As a response, the Minister is introducing numerous Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) to address some of the concerns in the Bill, including provision for small-scale NHP manufacturers to be excluded from the legislation as well as rongoā.
"I'm comfortable that the evidence available suggests these products don't pose a significant risk to public health, so the SOP will introduce changes so that small-scale natural health products will be able to be exempted from a product authorisation or manufacturing licence from the new regulator where their products are made and supplied in person to customers in New Zealand," Dr Verrall said, adding however that there was still a need to regulate natural health products as they are not risk-free. …