When a former Conservative Treasury minister calls for an industry to be nationalised it’s a clear sign that the sector must be fundamentally broken.

Lord Jim O’Neill, former Treasury minister for both David Cameron and Theresa May and chair of a review into antibiotic resistance in 2016, told an event at the Wellcome Trust last month that the failure of the pharmaceutical sector to develop new antibiotics meant that it was time for the industry to be turned into some kind of "government funded utility".

No new antibiotic has emerged on the market in the last 40 years – a major concern when dire warnings about growing antibiotic resistance seem to come out almost daily.

A recent United Nations report warned that unless urgent action is taken AMR will have devastating consequences, including causing 10 million deaths a year by 2050 and damage to the global economy similar to the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Simple infections may become untreatable and routine operations and chemotherapy might become impossible because there will be no drugs to treat the infections that often come afterwards.