By Natalie Grover and Maggie Fick
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s business climate is deterring pharma companies from investing in the country, the CEO of AstraZeneca said on Thursday, citing his company’s decision to shift plans for a new manufacturing plant to Ireland.
CEO Pascal Soriot gave list of reasons why the UK government’s ambition to be a global life sciences hub has hit snags, telling a news conference: “We want to invest in the UK… but we need to see supporting policies for the whole industry.”
While Britain has world-class research capabilities, he said it lacked other requirements to make it a life sciences centre – such as regulatory experts, manufacturing incentives, and access to green energy.
Without those elements, he said, companies like his will develop drugs in other markets “where you know you’re going to get access and you’re going to get a price that can justify the investment”.
“In fact, lately we’ve made a $400 million investment in a state of the art manufacturing facility which we wanted to make in this country and we made in Ireland because the tax rate was discouraging,” he told the briefing.
Adding to Ireland’s appeal, he said its government was “very committed,” to delivering green energy “very rapidly over the next few years”.
A spokesperson clarified the CEO had referred to a decision made in 2021 to invest in Ireland and said it was also linked to the UK government’s Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing and Access (VPAS).
The VPAS began in 2019 to help make drugs more affordable and returns a proportion of funds to the national health system (NHS) based on the sales of branded prescription medicines when a maximum sales growth rate is exceeded.
Soriot said access to clinical trials was also an obstacle, saying trials were delayed because the NHS is overwhelmed.
“It’s also a question of can we execute our clinical trials, do we want to invest and are we going to get the appropriate returns?” he said.
(Reporting by Natalie Grover and Maggie FickEditing by Tomasz Janowski and Barbara Lewis)
