Health and Care Bill

Debate between Lord Falconer of Thoroton and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Lords Hansard _ Part 1 & Report stage
Wednesday 16th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

It is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, whose contribution to the debate on assisted dying over many years is the admiration of all. I pay tribute to her and I know that the House thinks that as well.

I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is proposing for the following reason. We are trying to deal with an issue of conscience in Parliament. Issues of conscience generally have a bad time in Parliament because the major parties are not interested in such issues. You have to fight under our parliamentary procedures in order for issues of conscience to get dealt with. I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, that this is a complex and difficult issue, but it is one that requires parliamentary time and, above all, Parliament to address the issue and make a decision.

I cannot convey adequately the mess that the law is now in. The law does not have the stomach to be enforced. Nobody wants a decent person who helps a loved one to die because they are having a terrible death to be the subject of prosecution, conviction and a possible sentence of 14 years. The law has been stood on its head and the Director of Public Prosecutions has been given the power to say that he will not prosecute if certain guidelines are followed. That means that the most basic principle of English law is subverted. It is not the judge and jury any more who decide whether you are guilty of the offence but the well-meaning and admirable Director of Public Prosecutions. If he says that you are not to be prosecuted, you are in the clear. If he says that you are to be prosecuted—remember you have assisted somebody to take their own life—you are guilty. He is making the decision. That reflects the way in which our society is trying to deal with the issue.

What we need is proper parliamentary time for parliamentarians to address this exceptional issue. I was a remainer, tragically, and was very much against all the strange ways in which Parliament operated. But this is an exceptional matter. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, with respect, is not talking sensibly when he says that that we are sticking this matter on to the Commons. The Commons will have to decide whether they agree or not.

I urge this House to adopt the amendment, not because noble Lords agree or disagree on the issue of assisted dying but because they take the view that Parliament should properly address issues of conscience. Please do not be swayed one way or the other by the issues on assisted dying, because everybody knows that there are strong arguments in favour and against—I feel as passionately as those who are against. Address the issue on the basis of whether Parliament should be able to deal with issues of conscience.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, it would be perfectly possible for someone in the House of Commons to raise this issue and deal with it there. What concerns me—I pick up what the noble Lords, Lord Cormack and Lord Howarth, said—is that this seems to be a constitutional issue. I am not going to say a word about the rights and wrongs of assisted suicide or assisted dying. However, I shall just read a few words of the amendment. It asks us to agree that the

“Secretary of State must, within the period of 12 months … lay before Parliament”


not just the possibility of a Private Member’s Bill being given time, which was what was suggested earlier, but a draft Bill. That is telling the Government what legislation they have to pass. This is a matter that transcends issues of compassion or whether one is on one side of the argument or the other, because what we in the Lords are telling the Commons is that they have to support us telling the Government to put forward a Bill with which they may not agree. But they do not have any choice if this amendment is passed. That Bill has to,

“permit terminally ill, mentally competent adults legally to end their own lives”.

The amendment is not asking the Government to please give time—I could understand that. It is telling, not asking, the Government to put forward a draft Bill in support of one side of the argument. Whichever side I was on, I would feel absolutely impelled to resist this amendment.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Falconer of Thoroton and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Lords Hansard - part one & Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

Before we come to this important group of amendments, I have one housekeeping matter. As noble Lords are aware, the amendments have been marshalled according to the instruction of 13 October 2021, and that puts Clauses 55 to 61 towards the end of our Committee stage. If noble Lords who have the ninth Marshalled List of amendments go to Amendment 319A, they will see a number of pages of government amendments which, in effect, introduce a range of new offences and new powers for the state. In effect, they introduce the offences of locking on and of being equipped for locking on, and they change the law on wilful obstruction of the highway and on obstruction of major transport works.

This is not for the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, but it would be convenient if the Government, at some stage during Committee, indicated how they intend to deal with the pages and pages of amendments. A whole new structure of offences is being introduced in Committee in the Lords without the stages in the Commons having been gone through and without a Second Reading on those issues. This is not for now, because I have given no warning of it, but it will take as long as it takes to get an answer as to whether special provisions will be made, whether the Government intend to stop the Committee and have a Second Reading, or whatever. Whatever the plans are in relation to this, we on this side of the House—indeed, I think the whole House—would like to know, so we can think about how we deal with it, because it is an important issue.

The group we are about to deal with concerns youth justice. We are into a new part of the Bill and part of this group will raise issues about the age of criminal responsibility. The only reason I am starting is because my Amendment 219B requires the centralised monitoring of court decisions to impose youth custodial remands. As noble Lords will know, a whole new regime of remanding people aged 10 to 17 in custody was introduced by the LASPO Act in 2012. It gives rise to very practical difficulties throughout the country in relation to finding appropriate places to remand people of that age in what is, in effect, detention of some sort. There is no centralised monitoring.

In responding to this amendment, will the Minister indicate what the current arrangements are for monitoring this nationally, and what is the Government’s proposal, if any, for making sure that national statistics are regularly available? Without such statistics, it is difficult to have an informed debate about what additional provision is required, save to say that the experience on the ground is that there needs to be more proper provision over a range of options. I beg to move.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 220. I feel very strongly about the issue of the age of responsibility of children. I first raised it in this House in 2006, when a Labour Government dismissed it out of hand. I was for 35 years a family judge dealing with children; I happen also to have brought up three children, and I care about children. In 2006, what is now known about young children and the maturation of their brains was not particularly well known, but a great deal of evidence has now come forward. It was looked at by the Select Committee on Justice in the other place in November of last year.

Psychiatrists gave evidence, in particular about the fact that young children aged 10—and, for goodness’ sake, a child of 10 is young—do not really mature until considerably later. We have only to look at what is happening across Europe as an example. Scotland has raised the age to 12. The age of responsibility across Europe is either 12 or, in more places, 14. We remain at 10. I think it is probably because successive Governments, on both sides of this House, are afraid of what the public will say.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord misunderstood, if I may say so, what I was saying. Of course one had to treat the Bulger case with great care. I had a part in giving what were by then two young men lifetime anonymity, so I had to learn a great deal about what went on. Of course they had to be dealt with severely but what should happen in the future, in another case, should be, under the Children Act, secure accommodation, where they could have been kept as long as if they had been criminalised. I was merely using that appalling Bulger case as an example of how 84,000 people thought that they should stay in prison for ever, until they died. My point was not to treat the Bulger case as less serious; it was unbelievably serious. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, said, it has cast a long shadow, which continues today. The Bulger case was wrong in that the children should not have been tried in an adult criminal court. It was purely and simply to show the punitive element in this country, which had a marked effect on the noble and learned Lord’s Government. When I raised this issue in 2006, I was dismissed summarily, it being seen as quite unsuitable to raise the age from 10 to 12. That Government were without the evidence that there is today, but, for goodness’ sake, they also took the view that Lucy Frazer took to Sir Robert Neill’s committee.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

My Lords, that was my fault. I was not for one moment suggesting that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, was saying that the Bulger case did not require enormously sensitive handling, nor that she was in any way underestimating the seriousness of it. I was seeking to say that the fact that there were tabloid campaigns about it and that people were very concerned about it was absolutely legitimate. What they were asking for was not necessarily legitimate, but there was very real concern. Obviously, there must be anonymity, but if the matter is dealt with entirely in the care system, without any public element of how the law is dealing with it, then the community never gets satisfaction in relation to what is happening. By satisfaction, I mean that there must be some recognition within the justice system of the appalling nature of what has happened.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Falconer of Thoroton and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Report: 3rd sitting Hansard: House of Lords
Wednesday 10th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I have two comments to make in response. First, the Leveson 2 inquiry was promised. As I understand the position of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, now, he is saying that maybe wrongdoing is going on and it is the same as was expected before, but promising Leveson 2 was a mistake. Secondly and separately, Sir Brian Leveson found in his report that the remedies of the law, the remedies to which he referred, were open only to the wealthy. That is what he found as a provision. Therefore, the suggestion that the law provides an adequate remedy before the recommendations made by Sir Brian Leveson is, in my view, wrong. I pray in aid of that the conclusions that Sir Brian Leveson made after a full inquiry.

I turn now to the amendments tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. I strongly support them and I think that they are entirely appropriate for this Data Protection Bill because they deal with those who abuse data protection. Why should people not have protection in relation to this? I strongly disagree with the suggestion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, that this goes further than Leveson. It does not, because what Leveson said was that if a newspaper can join a body which could provide a cheap way of dealing with it and it does not, it should be liable to pay the costs unless there is good reason not to. That is precisely what the amendment does, and I say that with some added experience in relation to this. I was involved at the time when Section 40 was being drafted. It was in effect an agreed draft between the Government and their lawyers, with Mr Oliver Letwin representing the Government along with the full majesty of the Treasury Solicitor advising him. We were trying to agree an amendment that gave effect to Section 40. It was passed almost unanimously by the House of Commons and it was passed in this House as well. The suggestion that it goes further than what Leveson proposed is wrong, so I strongly support it.

Having had the benefit of all of those lawyers from the Government at the time, I also strongly disagree with the assertion by the noble Lords, Lord Pannick and Lord Lester, that this would be in breach of the Human Rights Act. It most certainly would not, and I am encouraged in that by what was said by my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws. Please do not listen to the siren song of the media. Give people the protection that everyone thought they were entitled to. It does not infringe on a free press; it simply makes sure that people like the parents of the victims of the Soham murderer do not have their data mined when there could not be any possible justification for it.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak, but I feel impelled to do so. I have no time for the media. I have been libelled and I disliked the experience a great deal. But what we are being asked to provide is a remedy. They are saying that the current remedies will not do and that the remedy is an inquiry. As a judge, I have chaired a number of inquiries, and there are other former judges in this House who have done so. They are inevitably long-winded. This one would go on for a very long time, so I would ask this question: what sort of remedy would there be at the end if the inquiry is mired in a huge number of lawyers making a great deal of money out of defending all sorts of groups of people? At the end of the day we would get—what?—a report.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Falconer of Thoroton and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, perhaps I may make two brief points. I had not intended to speak. Currently, I support the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, but that is not the point I really want to make. We are hearing passages from the written opinion of a distinguished member of the Bar, a Queen’s Counsel, and, like me, other Members must think that that is profoundly unsatisfactory. We ought not to be asked to vote—as we shall be—on hearing little snippets. If the QC’s opinion is to be used in this House, we should all have an opportunity to read it.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

First of all, we gave a copy of the opinion to the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and to the other side, and we placed it in the Library of the House on Friday. I apologise, but I did say that in my opening remarks. I completely agree with the noble and learned Baroness—she is obviously right. However, we have made the opinion available to everyone. If the noble and learned Baroness would like to go to the Library and read it, and quickly come back to vote in my favour, I would be very grateful.