Office for Demographic Change Bill [HL]

Viscount Craigavon Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 4th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Craigavon (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, on introducing this Bill and the way that he has done it; I speak very much in support of it. I spoke in favour of these same ideas contained in an amendment previously offered by the noble Lord in the Immigration Bill. It was resisted by the then Minister, mainly on the grounds that immigration was covered by the Migration Advisory Committee and that its role was being widened to cover the immigration system as a whole.

I hope that this debate and the future of the Office for Demographic Change—the ODC—can range much wider than just immigration, as will my contribution now. Attention is being drawn today to the central role that population size, increasing or decreasing, plays in so many aspects of our lives. If the Minister today tells us that the Cabinet Office would be the “hosting” ministry for the resulting provisions in this Bill, I hope that that office could anyway become the lead centre for liaising with the many other ministries which are also directly affected by what happens to UK population size. I hope that might emerge regardless of what happens to this Bill.

I realise that this Bill is rightly drawn quite tightly in order to start off with a manageable remit, and one accepts the stated assumption that the ODC may not consider the impact of any alternative policies—but it can commission research and draw on the experience of other countries around the world. Following what is proposed in the Bill, the annual charter would set out the population projections in different timescales and what policies might be needed to achieve an acceptable level of population. This would be subject to an annual parliamentary debate. That would bring a most useful focus on this subject from multiple angles, and one would hope that over time it would develop some sort of agreed methodology in this very complex subject. The assumption is at present that there is no attempt at such a general assessment.

One of the main concerns worth addressing is how much the continuing reduction in UK total fertility rates is based on conscious and intentional decisions—maybe based on economic circumstances—and how much is driven by an intuitive, almost unconscious, preference. It is also very difficult to quantify the widely claimed reaction of this being a crowded island, with which many agree.

Personally, I shy away from the general economic growth mantra, but that itself in future might be affected by artificial intelligence rather than AI having any direct physical influence on the number of births. Having followed over many years the progress of numbers in China and the one-child family norm—it has now officially ended but is still voluntarily prevalent—it is astonishing to learn that what the Chinese call assisted reproduction technologies, such as IVF, are used by more than 1 million people a year and are widely encouraged. We know how many other national schemes to bolster population have largely failed over the years.

Although we can learn from other countries, I realise that this Bill mainly addresses the UK, where we have major considerations relating to population to deal with—for example, the cost of housing and the exorbitant cost of childcare, as well as the issue of pensions in the broader context of the interests of the old versus the young. All those are concerns of different ministries.

Finally, in this short debate, I again congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, and Civitas on this initiative, which will, I hope, lead to greater things—if not exactly what is in this Bill. I hope that the Minister may see fit to encourage the location of the Cabinet Office as the centre of wisdom and feedback on this subject from all other ministries.

Surrogacy

Viscount Craigavon Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Craigavon (CB)]

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, for initiating this debate and taking the lead on this subject as she has done. As she said, the law relating to surrogacy is seriously out of date. My main message this evening is that the law needs urgent updating, and that we should very much hope that the Law Commission would be able to include this task in one of its current projects. Despite the deadline for submissions officially having closed at the end of October, I learned in its acknowledgement of my submission that it would nevertheless be able to monitor this debate.

I shall give some brief examples of things going wrong at the moment. We have stories, some documented in newspapers, of newborn babies being handed over in car parks. We have the increased use of social media and self-help leading to what might be called underground transactions, sometimes in closed online groups. We have the courts and judges having to—rightly—bend the law laid down in 1985, and now out of date, to allow deadlines, time limits and even expense limits to be breached, for the very good reason of putting the best interests of the child first. That might be good British pragmatism, but it is not normally how we think of our law working and it adds uncertainty for following future cases. We should not rely on the law to be reformed only in response to outrage at a certain type of train-crash situation or worse. Having mentioned all that, I should say that the present system can work satisfactorily and happily for many people, but it is the increasing number of bad experiences, especially for those driven abroad by uncertainties, that need to be addressed.

I want now to mention two recent, largely academic milestones by those who have wanted to bring together the voices and opinions in this field, to assist serious reform taking place on the basis of more accurate information and data. First, in November 2015 an academic working group produced the excellent publication Surrogacy in the UK: Myth Busting and Reform, which is contained in full in the very useful Lords Library briefing for this debate and is available online. To give some credit, I say that the working group was led by the lead writer, Dr Kirsty Horsey, an academic lawyer at Kent Law School at the University of Kent, with strong support from trustees of Surrogacy UK, which is a not-for-profit agency and provider of information and support, as well as Sarah Norcross, the director of the Progress Educational Trust. For those who might wonder, that organisation is my personal link to this subject and past connection to related fields, going back to its foundation at the time of the HFE Bills in this House in the 1990s. It is good to see listening to this debate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who took some of those Bills through this House. I know that he is interested in how the law will progress.

The report to which I referred supported the existing altruistic, compensatory model for surrogacy. One of its major recommendations was that much of the legal work that now takes considerable time after birth could be done before birth, so that the intended parents could register the birth and assume legal responsibility right from the start. Some of the existing legal time limits, already being breached, could be relaxed. The systematic collecting of information and data—currently lacking—would provide the basis for sound future decisions.

I come to the second recent milestone. As the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, mentioned, in May this year the aforementioned team convened an all-day conference in London, at which both she and I were present. It was a chance for all parts of this interest group to meet, debate and interact, as well as to hear from the varied experience of some surrogate mothers and to some extent, so far as possible, to arrive at a consensus for changing and updating the law. Again the consensus was in support of the present altruistic, compensatory model, but there was discussion about the extent of reasonable expenses, currently allowed under the law. Also, there was wide consensus that legal parentage should be granted to the intended parents before birth. As my time in this debate is a bit short, I shall just refer noble Lords to the report of the proceedings of that conference, which will be published by the end of this year in a special edition of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

I want to mention one of my most remarkable Cross-Bench colleagues, who is listening next to me, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who has had her own recent known experience of surrogacy. She has asked me to say that she is happy to lend her full support to a reference to the Law Commission—a powerful endorsement.

As I have been saying, we hope that the Law Commission can look favourably on this subject as one of its projects. Given the timescale before anything might be turned into legislation, I hope that the Department of Health can produce, and keep up to date, guidelines for best practice in this field both for the medical profession and clinics and, quite separately, for the lay public wanting to know what their options are. Could the Minister give a commitment and timescale to that, and that the guidelines would be updated?

Finally and very briefly, I say that it would be helpful if the Minister could deal with one outstanding legal matter, which has already been referred to—the declaration of incompatibility in the High Court Family Division in May. Can the Government say how and how soon they will rectify what they are required to do under that judgment?