Britain a 'terrible place' to sell medicines, says Sanofi executive

A senior pharmaceuticals executive has called on the government to come up with a "proper" roadmap for raising spending on new medicines, saying Britain is "not a good place" to develop or sell drugs.

- Julia Kollewe

Paul Naish, the UK head of market access for the French company Sanofi, said Britain was "at a critical point".

He said: "We've still got the best universities, we've got some of the best scientists in the world, but it's not a good place to do the development work for medicines. It's an expensive place to operate, and it's a terrible place to sell medicines."

The drugmaker MSD, known as Merck in the US, this week halted construction on its £1bn research centre in London.

The announcement was a big blow to a life sciences sector hailed by the government as "one of the crown jewels of the economy".

Sanofi, which invests £35m a year in research and development in Britain out of £6.7bn globally, has carried out 50% fewer clinical trials in the UK in the past couple of years, despite a large pipeline of new drugs.