Human Tissue (Quality and Safety for Human Application) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Lord Winston and Lord Deben

Wednesday 9th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

It is natural for the noble Lord, Lord Warner, to have put his finger on exactly what I was about to come to as my final point of discussion.

I say to my noble friend that the problem with which we are faced is that this is a statutory instrument that inherently proposes that it could work, that it could be put into operation. The more I look at it, the more it seems quite impossible for the Government to say that it could work. My noble friend has been absolutely honest about this. She has said that she cannot tell what the future will hold. That of course is true for all of us. She has also said that we have her commitment that these things would be prioritised where priority was necessary. That is a commitment which we respect, but the problem with prioritisation is that you have to be able to do it. I do not believe that any of this is in any way deliverable. It is therefore no good us having this sort of fantasy debate.

We are in fairyland, unless that is politically incorrect as a phrase. This is closer to Enid Blyton than anything I have ever been involved in—it is the Faraway Tree, it has nothing to do with reality. When the noble Lord, Lord Winston, makes an intelligent and sensible contribution about some of the problems which occur when you try to transmute something which is to something which is different, so that it is not quite what people may think, actually in a curious way he is being irrelevant. The truth is that none of this is possible. Arguing about whether it is going to be exactly right or not is a further lunacy. We are even further away from it, because we are now introducing rationality into the discussion. That is one thing that clearly cannot be introduced into the entirely irrational basis upon which we are proceeding.

I am the only person sitting on this side, and I know why: nobody can actually go through this exercise without realising what nonsense it all is. What a ridiculous proposal we have before us. Why have we allowed ourselves to get into this position? I am sorry it is my noble friend who is faced with this, but I do not think this House is doing itself any good by conniving in what is manifestly a total nonsense.

I do not believe it is entirely in order to ask people to support the only deal on the tapis. We all have to accept that the deal the Prime Minister has got is the best deal you could get if you wanted a deal like that. It happens to be much worse than where we are, and I certainly would not vote for it if I had the opportunity. I do not think anybody should vote for their constituents to be poorer, because that is what you have to do if you vote for the Prime Minister’s deal. But that is not the point. We have in front of us proposals which cannot be delivered.

I sympathise with my noble friend over the position in which she finds herself, but I hope she and other Ministers—because we will be continuing this discussion today—will go back to the Government and say, “I cannot stand up and defend this stuff any longer, because I am not in the business of defending Enid Blyton. I cannot be asked to do this, it is not fair”. My speech is entirely on the side of the Minister. It is not fair that she should have been put in the position of defending something which is intolerable, because it is not possible. It cannot be delivered. There is no no-deal scenario which does not mean chaos, so there is no point in having legislation which pretends that it will stop a no-deal scenario being chaos. That is inevitable, ineluctable and inextricable from the whole process. Of course, my noble friend will get her SI through—we have a ludicrous system whereby we cannot do things to it—but I ask her to go back to the Government, and she does not even have to tell us if she does, and say that this is not a proper position to put Ministers in, having to argue for what is unarguable, a fairy tale, and an insult to the intelligence of all of us.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

As my name has been mentioned, perhaps your Lordships will allow me to make one observation. Perhaps I should also apologise to the Minister, because we have already crossed swords once earlier today on the issue of folic acid supplementation of flour—which I feel strongly about, because the evidence supports it. I slightly disagree with noble friend Lady Thornton, who makes many useful contributions to debates on health and I respect what she says. In the case of human tissue—I do not know whether the Minister is listening—the issue is not just the treatment of patients. A big problem, to which I vaguely alluded, is that we are still collaborating with scientists in Europe. We share tissues. We share cell cultures. We have been able to transport those, although we may not be able to do so in future. However, we are still processing them with different procedures, which require ethical consent. If one regulation—in Germany, for example—changes in respect of regulation for ethical consent in Britain during the experiment, how does that stand with the current arrangements for Brexit? This is a major problem. The Human Tissue Act is not primarily needed for the treatment of patients; it is much more for the development of medical research, which will improve the treatment and understanding of a whole range of diseases. That is not considered in the regulations. It is a major problem for us, which we need to sort out.

I completely sympathise with the position that the Minister is in. I am talking to her as the Government and not as someone who has to answer these complex questions. The point that I am trying to make is that we should have had more consultation on the regulations, which deal with a complex matter. Many of us have seen the regulations only briefly, so the Grand Committee has not had the chance to look at them in detail. That is also a problem, which is why I wonder whether there is some possibility of withdrawing them for the time being.