Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority/Human Tissue Authority

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has laid before us a Question that rightly draws attention to two issues: public safety and public confidence. They are the issues that the Minister rightly addressed last week when he kindly and courteously invited us to be given a briefing about the Government’s intentions.

For me the jury is out on these issues. I would certainly want to see, at the very minimum, a reform of the HFEA. The Minister will recall, as other noble Lords will, the debates that we had during the passage of the Bill, when a number of us argued for the creation of a national bioethics commission to oversee some of these ethical issues. I suppose that I subscribe to the cautionary verse of Hilaire Belloc, who said,

“always keep a-hold of Nurse

For fear of finding something worse”.

I would like to see the colour of the Government’s money. I want to see precisely what they have in mind before coming to a conclusion.

It is worth going back, as the noble and learned Lord did in his remarks, to the creation of the HFEA. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, has said, it was necessary to create it—these were the words of the Warnock report—

“if the public is to have confidence”.

She said that it needed to be an “independent body”, that the membership was,

“not to be unduly influenced by sectional interests”,

and that its membership was to include,

“a diverse range of views”.

She also laid great emphasis on what she described as the,

“special status of the human embryo”.

I have a Question on the Order Paper at the moment asking the Minister to update the figures given to us by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, during the passage of the legislation two years ago, but the figure that was given then was that some 2 million embryos had been destroyed or experimented on since the passage of the 1990 legislation, so these are not trivial questions. The question of the status of the human embryo has always struck me as central to this argument.

I note that the chair of the HFEA, Professor Lisa Jardine, said in the Guardian on 5 January that,

“the safeguarding of the ‘special status of the embryo’ will be lost”,

if the HFEA is abolished. In an article in the journal Nature last August, it was suggested that,

“losing the HFEA as a discrete body could undermine public confidence”.

The article on Professor Jardine adds that the HFEA,

“carefully shelters human embryos from routine experimentation”.

Perhaps the Minister could tell us whether he has asked how many embryos have been thus spared; surprisingly, the HFEA, via Parliamentary Questions, says that it cannot tell.

Whether it is the unnecessary destruction of human embryos, the dangers caused to women by hyperovulation syndrome—before the Committee met today I passed the Minister a new paper from a German medical magazine about this question, because it goes right to the heart of patient safety—the ethics and mercantile nature of exploiting poorer women through the sale of eggs, an issue that the HFEA is currently considering, or the extraordinary way in which the HFEA has, for instance, pursued Dr Mohamed Taranissi, requiring it to meet legal costs of nearly £190,000, it is obvious, as the current HFEA chief executive stated in a memo, that,

“something clearly has gone wrong—badly wrong over a sustained length of time”.

At the very minimum, I think that reform is needed.

I would therefore be grateful to hear how Her Majesty’s Government propose that there should be what the Minister himself has described as a “lighter touch”. Is that something that people such as me should be fearful of, or should we welcome it? Does it mean that in any sense there will be less regulation? Will the status of the human embryo be diminished further? How will the exercise of the HFEA’s powers through this lighter touch be done? Also, how will the Government ensure that the requirements of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which stand in place, will be adhered to if the HFEA ceases to exist in its present form? Who will be responsible for the transfer of sensitive data that the HFEA holds? How will independence, freedom from undue influence or sectional interests and a diverse range of views be upheld?