My Lords, I declare an interest as a veteran of many health service reorganisations, through which I have consistently advocated for children and young people not to be forgotten, so it will not be a surprise that I am doing the same today. I have also spent many years making the case for better int…
My Lords, I have spoken to my clinical colleagues about the issue of age at enrolment and they expect enrolment at 11 or 12 to be vanishingly rare. However, I ask noble Lords to consider the case of a child I will call Jo, who was a biological male socially transitioned at two and a half by his pare…
My Lords, I remain grateful to the noble Baroness for her work and her expertise in this area, which I know has been acknowledged both by the previous Government and this Government. I will certainly take on board what she has said and ask my officials to discuss this further with NHS England.
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 383. I have so far limited my speeches on the Bill to a maximum of two to three minutes but on this one occasion I would like to take more time, because this may be the only opportunity I have to discuss how we can integrate some of the approaches that have bee…
May I respond to that? I have not said that they cannot be part of the team. It is likely that the person who is covering a particular area or locality will be known to the team and to the palliative care services. They may or may not be as familiar as other specialists—I hope not, by virtue of the …
My Lords, I will speak to a number of amendments in this group. I can be briefer on some because the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, has copied some of my homework and taken it as his own—which I take to be a good thing.
Not at all. When I first saw the term “independent advocates” in the Bill, I worried because, in my clinical career as a neurodisability consultant, I have had some very negative experiences of advocates who allegedly were speaking on behalf of people with a range of disabilities but who, we were fa…
My Lords, I will be very brief. When it comes to assessing risk to children, a plastic bath duck has better risk assessment than AI chatbots. I fully support my noble friend’s amendments.
To clarify, whether we take the system proposed by my noble friend or the original system with the series of doctors, it is very unlikely under any circumstance that the clinician who is providing primary care for the patient will also be in one of those formal roles specified by the Bill. The reaso…
My Lords, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that my mother held doctors in great esteem and reverence until the day that I and my rowdy friends qualified, and then the whole mystique was exploded overnight.
My serious point is that I am still mystified by Clause 5, because it remains completel…
My Lords, I will be brief, because I believe that my Amendment 122 and the consequential amendments that follow it address a very straightforward and practical issue—saying that could be the kiss of death, but never mind. It is absolutely self-evident that, if this Bill passes into law, the monitori…
Long speeches are unpopular at the best of times, but particularly as I now stand between noble Lords and lunch, so I will try not to make one. It has been a very useful group. We have had a lot of discussion about the appointment process, transparency, conflict of interest and how we ensure public …
I want to make two very brief points. First, I support the point made about proposed new subsection (6)(g), to be inserted by Amendment 115, by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, on being clear about whether this is a medical treatment. If it is a medical treatment, it drives physicians continuously…
I would never come at the noble and learned Lord, for whom I have the greatest respect. We de facto have to make changes to the Mental Capacity Act in the application of this, because, where a person does not have capacity, you make a best interests decision, but, clearly, we are not doing that in t…
My Lords, I want to speak to this amendment for two reasons. One is that my name is on it. The second is for nostalgic purposes, because the first time I spoke in this House was in a debate that my noble friend Lady Kidron was leading on smartphones in schools. I stood up and spoke in her shadow—not…
I will be brief, given the time. I will talk about only two things and try to keep noble Lords awake with them: academic passion and the gut microbiome. That will keep noble Lords on their toes.
On academic passion, when I was president of the paediatric college, we thought we did not have enough f…
The GMC guidance would need to be amended because, at present, there is specific advice on guidance around supporting patients at end of life. It says:
“Where patients raise the issue of assisting them to end their own life, or ask for information that might encourage or assist them in doing so, re…
My Lords, we know that people may have many of the problems that proponents of the Bill have described as reasonable justifications for why someone may want to end their life. They may already be a burden, as they see it, or incontinent, or under financial duress, or have pain from arthritis, or hav…
My Lords, I was not intending to speak to the amendment, but I also met Ceri this week, and it was a privilege to talk to him. I had not heard that part of his story until my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson told us about it.
I recently stepped down as a trustee of the children’s hospice Noah’s Ark,…
My Lords, I have added my name to the amendments in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and the noble Lord, Lord Nash. When I was president of the paediatric college, an important part of my job was urging Government Ministers that protecting and investing in children is the only way to prot…
My Lords, I agree with everyone who has said that we must ask the question: what is the motivation for that individual? I submit that, unless a doctor can ask that question, they are not able to discharge their duties in two ways. First, they cannot assess the capacity of the individual to make that…
My Lords, I will be brief, because many of the points have been made, but I would really like to make two points. My first point follows the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, about—I hesitate to use this term—“levelling up”. We know that there is a spectrum of provision available, not just…
My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax of Cameron, on bringing forward this important debate on the impact of artificial intelligence. I have read deeply concerning reports from AI companies. For example, the chief scientist of Anthropic, who has already been referred to—that is the compan…
My Lords, we are faced with a situation where, for 15 years, clinicians in this country have told children and young people that these medications are safe, fully reversible and indeed life-saving. Last year, they were rightly banned from clinical practice. However, the upshot is that now, of the 75…
Regardless of the amount of scrutiny, there are absolute conflicts between intent and delivery. The reason there cannot be trust in how we deliver this in real life is the very point made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, and the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin: on the one hand, we are discussing the im…
My Lords, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 assumes capacity until proved otherwise. However, many people with learning disabilities have neither the ability nor the capacity to make life-changing or even death-making decisions. Under the Bill, because they are chronologically adults, they are not permit…
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, who makes a very good point on public opinion. I am persuaded that one of the reasons why the Bill should pass is that the public broadly support it. But they support it only if it works. If it does not work, and if it does not d…
My Lords, as we have discussed at length, this is a multifaceted Bill, so I would welcome our achieving greater clarity of purpose. Without purpose, there is no focus, and we can get very lost in complexity. As we progress through Committee, I ask noble Lords to consider the opportunities offered in…
My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, who has done so much, of course, for the rights and well-being of children in her work.
It will probably not surprise colleagues to hear that I do not think that this is a good Bill. As other noble Lords have said, it…