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Lords Amendment No. 6: In page 11, line 21, after "if" insert:
in the course of a business carried on by him, and medicinal products of that description were sold or supplied, or procured to be sold, supplied, manufactured or assembled, at any time before the first appointed day and
§ 12.45 p.m.
§ Mr. SnowI beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
Though differently worded, the Amendment is very similar in its object to an Amendment moved in Committee by the hon. Member for Somerset, North (Mr. Dean), its purpose being to limit the transitional exemption in subsection (2) to products which the promoter himself had effectively on the market at the first appointed day.
My right hon. Friend resisted the hon. Gentleman's Amendment, on the ground that it would at an early stage in the operation of the new licensing scheme involve extra work for the licensing authority in dealing with standard preparations—that is, those for which a standard appears in such official compendia as the British Pharmacopaeia and the British Pharmaceutical Codex—and that in any event the requirement for the new product to be of the same description as the older one was a very severe test in the light of the provisions in Clause 117.
However, since that time additional arguments have been advanced on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry and, in the light of this, my right hon. Friend 779 thinks that there has been some underlining of the potentially dangerous situation which could arise if a manufacturer were to launch a new product during the transitional period without a licence and based purely on his own assessment, which was unchecked, as to his own product being of the same description as another product already on the market.
In the light of these representations, which underly what was said by the hon. Gentleman, we think it right to make the Amendment.
§ Question put and agreed to.