Medical Innovation Bill [HL]

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Friday 12th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jolly]

I thank my noble and learned friend for helping me out. I thought that I said at the onset that this was felt by the Government to be outside the scope of the Private Member’s Bill. But they are very sympathetic to the idea and have already started to have conversations. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, talked about safety and, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, responsibility is another thing. The Government see it as the responsibility of doctors to enter on to the registry. In the mean time, I ask the noble Lord to consider withdrawing his amendment.

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

Surely it is important that this register should be compulsory. The obvious point is that if you innovate and it fails and then you do not register, that would destroy the whole point of having a register.

[Lord O'Donnell]

Perhaps I may come back on whether it is relevant for this Bill. As I understand it, the Minister said that the Government were deciding to set up this register and therefore it is not a question of what is in the Bill. We were asking whether the Government can make the register compulsory and how they would do that.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, in speaking to this group of amendments, I propose to short-circuit a number of them and draw the Committee’s particular attention to Amendment 65, which stands in my name and in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Darzi of Denham, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth.

This is about capacity. There is an awful lot on the Marshalled List today relating to capacity. There is hardly a Member of your Lordships’ House with an interest in the Bill who has not had a stab at producing a good capacity provision. We have proposed this capacity provision because we do not believe that Clause 3 goes anything like far enough. There are two particular aspects of Amendment 65 which go further than Clause 3 and which, I suggest to your Lordships, would provide significant reassurance. I would be really disappointed if we were brushed off, in the way in which we have been, in relation to these amendments and in respect of the two particular matters.

I draw your Lordships’ attention to paragraphs (a) and (d) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 65. In defining capacity, we talk about a,

“capacity commensurate with a decision to end his or her own life”,

thereby highlighting the importance of the decision. In paragraph (a), we then suggest that it should be required that it should be proved that a person,

“is not suffering from any impairment of, or disturbance in, the functioning of the mind or brain”,

then come the additional words,

“or from any condition which might cloud or impair his or her judgement”.

For those of us who have taken an interest in mental illness over, in some of our cases, decades and studied the subject in detail, there is a real concern that if those words or something like them are not included then people may determine that their own lives should be ended as a result of a mental condition of a permanent nature, which is easily defined as such, or by a temporary medical condition.

I am an absolute rank amateur in that I think I know a bit about mental health but it is as a layperson. I know that there are people in this House—I can see at least one present—who have a great deal of expert knowledge and are internationally admired for their knowledge about mental health. Of course I defer, as the House quite rightly deferred earlier to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, on palliative medicine, to any such views on the precise diagnostic criteria. What is known—it is certainly known to lawyers because we have had to deal with this all the time during our careers—is that there are manuals of diagnostic criteria. One which I am accustomed to is an international document, ICD-10, which contains the details of many different mental conditions. Among those volumes there are mental conditions which could cloud or impair a person’s genuine judgment, making it a judgment that was led by that mental condition and not by a person’s general state. When mental illness occurs in a family—there will be people in this House who have had this experience—it can be very frustrating for the rest of the family because they know that the individual in question is not exercising an objective or genuine judgment but, worse still, not exercising what is in reality their own normal, rational judgment, which when they are not suffering they possess. That is the purpose of paragraph (a).

Paragraph (d) requires it to be shown that the person,

“is not the subject of influence by”—

that is in the Bill—

“or a sense of obligation or duty to, others”.

Almost all those of us who have been fortunate enough to have our parents survive to a very great age will have heard that parent saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this to you because there’ll be less for you at the end”, or, “I’m causing you immense trouble because you have to come 200 miles across the country when I have a small crisis”, or, “You’re paying people to look after me”, and so on. We all know these scenarios; they are extremely common. They happen all the time, sometimes even in the best regulated families. Those are situations in which not all, but some, feel a sense of obligation or duty to die—“You’d be better off without me”. In my view, it is a matter of simple ethics—if ethics are ever simple—that we should not be willing to countenance any person choosing to end their own life because they feel that that is going to benefit others.

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

My Lords, why is it thought wrong for someone to ask to die out of a sense of duty or a wish not to continue in a condition that is intolerable—the condition of being disruptive, indeed often destructive, to the well-being of their own family? All the way through their life until this point, putting their family first will have been counted a virtue, and then suddenly, when they most want to avoid the trouble, bother, sorrow and misery of disruption to their family, they are told they are not allowed to follow that motive. I simply find this extraordinarily puzzling and I would like the noble Lord to explain it to me.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

People with much less strength of character than the noble Baroness, who is known for her views and her enormous strength of character, are at risk of those feelings being adopted, condoned and co-opted by their family. Those of us who have practised law for many years have come across such cases. Indeed, there will be people who have observed it in the lives of friends and family. It is our view that a sense of obligation—“It would be better for my children if I were carried away”—is not a sufficient basis for allowing an individual to do what is anticipated by the Bill, which is deliberately to end the life of another person.

Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, I come down to a very practical issue. In the territory that we are discussing, pre-approval is absolutely necessary for dealing with staff and anti-money-laundering requirements.

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, which we have heard is really at the heart of the disasters of 2008. I have felt a creeping horror since the 1980s, when I was head of a college. People would frequently come up to me and say, “I’ve changed my mind, I’m not going to go on to a further degree or teach classics—I have had an offer that I can’t refuse”. This would be a young man or woman of about 21. You could see that their ethical standards had dropped away; they did not exist anymore. That was a shock to me then and it has been a shock to me ever since, so I very strongly support the amendment.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

I shall add just a bit, particularly to what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, was saying. When I entered the legal profession about 40 years ago, the branch that I joined had no rules of conduct at all, and gradually we appreciated that the public would not stand for that. The position now is that the legal profession has rules of conduct, although they are sometimes called codes rather than rules for the reason that was mentioned. I support the amendment against that background. I also suspect that, if we do not take that step now, we will have to take it in five or 10 years’ time when some other crisis emerges. It is an important step and, I respectfully suggest, an inevitable one, in line with what all the professions have had to deal with over the past 10 or 20 years in modernising how they behave and making their behaviour acceptable to the public. There is a lot to be said for the amendment against that background.