Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Patel Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, can the noble Viscount please assist me? I understand all the legal reasoning that he has put forward. I am not a lawyer, so I cannot challenge any of it. But I ask for his assistance on what actually happens in reality. In reality, lots of mothers lose their baby as a stillbirth. It happens at all periods of pregnancy. A lot of those losses are unexplained, and every health professional has a real concern when it happens, but for decades we have not been able to find reasons for unexplained stillbirths. If a mother, after 36 weeks of pregnancy, has unexpectedly lost her baby and she delivers a stillbirth, under this amendment, if I have interpreted it correctly, if she is reported to have interfered with that pregnancy—even if she did not—she would be made to prove that she was mentally unstable or financially handicapped. In the circumstance that she was neither of those things but had lost her baby naturally and inexplicably, how would the noble Viscount’s amendment work?

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I agree that all investigations in this matter should be conducted with great sensitivity. I take the noble Lord’s points, but at the end of the day you have to establish a principle. May I complete my point before the noble Lord intervenes further? If there is powerful evidence that the mother has wilfully terminated the birth of a child immediately up to the moment of birth, it is right that Parliament should set out a process whereby she has to be investigated. If she falls within the defence, she will have a defence. I admit that that would not prevent an investigation, but at the end of the day you have to determine where you stand on whether or not this House is really going to guard human life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

That does not detract from the fact that Amendment 456 would create a robust filter, through which prosecutions would have to go before instituting criminal proceedings. That would need the consent of the Attorney-General and without that consent—

[Lord Patel (CB)]

Can we just clarify what we are talking about? I am tempted to say that those putting forward these amendments are living in a world of fiction, but I am not so rude as to suggest that. I am not suggesting even that they are misguided. I think all these amendments and their proponents are doing this with a total conviction that wrong will be done if this provision gets through, so let us just address what wrong will be done.

The wrong that will be done is that a woman may try to abort or kill her baby at a late gestation or an early gestation. The criminality would be the same because she is doing so outside the 1967 Act. That will be the case, but that is not what the problem is. The problem is that hundreds of innocent women are wrongly accused of a criminal act and sent for police investigation. One person was sent to jail, and 10 of the other 100 that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, mentioned had further investigations carried out and were then taken to court.

The Whip is trying to accelerate me, but we cannot accelerate unless I can address the issues raised.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I apologise, but can I remind Members that interventions are short and sweet? But because this is Committee, people can participate in the debate at their chosen point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, but I will go on to Amendment 461H on in-person consultations. We have already heard from the proposers of Amendment 460, which would require that this consultation be in person. My amendment would require this, but it would also add that the gestational age of the baby should be ascertained by a medical scan or other equivalent means. Usually this means an ultrasound scan, which can be given at seven weeks onwards. First-trimester scans are generally safe, non-invasive and commonly used to confirm pregnancy, identify the due date of the baby and—

[Lord Patel (CB)]

May I just, for information, correct that? First-trimester ultrasound scans are carried out with a vaginal probe, so they are invasive.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I thank the Lord for that. But I think one of the American learned societies of obstetricians, gynaecologists and other kinds of medicine that indicates—as do other sites—that there is technology that is successful from seven weeks on, and certainly from nine or 10 weeks. There are differences. These differences are the subject of debate among medical professionals. I can see the noble Lord shaking his head.

Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Patel Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

That is why I tabled my Amendment 461A, which is not seeking to change the rest of the Abortion Act but is to try to make sure that we have—I give way to the noble Lord.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

Can the noble Baroness help me by clarifying what her amendment would mean? Currently, a provider, or anybody who counsels a woman seeking abortion, will take in good faith what the woman might say to them about her gestation. But the noble Baroness’s amendment would move that to “beyond reasonable doubt”, which is at the level of a criminal court and not a social justice or civil court. That would mean that, in every case, the health professional who counsels the woman would have to provide evidence that they believed her beyond reasonable doubt. That would mean that there would have to be evidence beyond reasonable doubt.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, one reason why I have chosen that phrase particularly at this stage—I might reconsider it for Report—is we are talking about a crime. If this happens beyond the terms which the law sets, it is a crime. This is about the change that happened, moving from taking the second pill at home to then just having both pills wherever. The case to which the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, referred earlier was one in which another lady got the pills and gave them to the chap. They were then applied unlawfully, obviously, and the other lady was also convicted—admittedly, it was a suspended sentence. But there was accountability.

Wales: Further Devolution

Lord Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for her question. She is very aware that, under the recent spending review, Stormont was awarded £19.2 billion—its largest ever financial settlement. As for additional tax-raising mechanisms, they exist, if Stormont wishes to use them. That is a matter for Stormont. We would support it in whichever endeavours it wants to do to access the powers already available to it.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, it is unusual for me to get up and support Wales, but in a recent debate about the manufacture of radio isotopes, I agreed that Wales had made a fantastic business case to have a nuclear reactor to produce radio isotopes—a facility that the United Kingdom does not possess. Therefore, patients in the UK suffer because we have to import all the radio isotopes needed for diagnosis and treatment. Will the Government support Wales and establish the nuclear reactor for the production of nuclear isotopes?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

This Government always support Wales—and I will be doing so this weekend when they are playing the Springboks. On the noble Lord’s specific point, last week I sat in on the debate that he mentioned, in which he raised some really interesting points that were answered by my noble friend. I will reflect on what he says and return to him on that.

International Women's Day

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel]

My Lords, many of you will have heard of HeLa cells, but perhaps not. HeLa cell lines are human cancer cell lines that were first grown in 1951 and which, 60 years later, are still growing in laboratories worldwide. They have been and still are used for research into finding cures for diseases. Research using HeLa cells has led to the development of vaccines for polio and the treatment of cervical cancer, to name only two areas. The cells are also used to treat diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, leukaemia and many others. Some 18,000 patents have been registered using modified HeLa cell lines, and have provided industry with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. Several Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists who used HeLa cells for research. Each and every one of us has benefited from cures for and the prevention of disease as a result of research on HeLa cells.

HeLa cells are so called because they were originally obtained from Henrietta Lacks—without her consent. She died at the age of 31 from an aggressive form of cervical cancer in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. She was a black woman descended from slaves. She was born in poverty, lived in poverty, was uneducated and, being black in the southern USA, was treated as an inferior human being. A few months before her death, she attended Johns Hopkins Hospital because she felt a growth and was suffering pain. The doctor who saw her took two specimen samples of tissue from her growth—one was for pathology diagnosis, the second he passed to a scientist carrying out research in growing human cells outside the body. Most cells obtained from other tissue samples died after a few days, but not Henrietta Lacks’ cells. Their number doubled within 24 hours and kept doubling, even in subsets, every 24 hours. They have been doing that ever since for the past 60 years. Tons of HeLa cells have been grown in laboratories worldwide over the past 60 years. Henrietta Lacks was recognised last year by a tombstone near where she might have been buried—no one knows exactly where she is buried.

It is time for humanity to pay back the debt to Henrietta Lacks. How? Every two minutes in the world a woman dies of cervical cancer. More than 500,000 women develop cervical cancer every year, the majority in countries in Africa and Asia. To a majority of young girls in the world, a cervical cancer vaccine to prevent that disease is not available because it is too costly for those countries to buy and set up programmes such as those we have here. There is an opportunity for us to do so today, and the Minister, without any cost to the UK Government, could launch a UN fund to which we should all contribute—including the industry, which has made billions of dollars in revenue. We should launch a global Henrietta Lack fund to treat women with cervical cancer and prevent it developing.