Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Bill

Debate between Julian Knight and Neil O'Brien

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 26th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to support this important Bill. I grew up in Huddersfield, and Barnsley are our great rivals, but despite that it is a pleasure to congratulate the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) on this hugely important Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) said, it protects important rights. He made the incredibly important point that our bodies are not for the state. They belong to us, and it is essential that we have the right to say no if we have objections, but I believe that the Bill includes safeguards to achieve that.

The hon. Member for Barnsley Central mentioned the case of Max Johnson, just nine years old, whose life was saved by a heart donation from Keira Ball, who had been tragically killed. I wonder whether I might also mention the Leicestershire case of Albert Tansey, whose life was saved by a heart transplant at the amazing Glenfield Hospital when he was just four years old. The hospital is home to the now saved children’s heart unit, which we have all strongly supported in Leicestershire. Thanks to the miraculous work done at Glenfield, he is now enjoying his ninth birthday, and his family are strongly in favour of the Bill. It has already been said that this could be called the “Getting on with your life Bill”, or the “Being a Member of Parliament Bill”, but it is also the “Enjoying your ninth birthday Bill”.

Although this debate could be rather bleak, there is some good news: 50,000 people are alive today thanks to organ transplants, including the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood), who is looking very well on it, I must say. The number of people registered as donors is rising—we thank them for that—and the numbers on the transplant waiting list have fallen steadily over the past eight years. However, the Bill is still necessary because some people are missing out. Between 2005 and 2010, some 49,000 people had to wait for an organ transplant, and 6,000 died while waiting, of whom 270 were children. We could save more lives if we had more donations. I am particularly conscious that for some groups, particularly ethnic minorities, it can be particularly difficult to find a transplant. I have seen the good work done by the NHS and visited a temple just north of my constituency to see the outreach work it is doing to try to find more donations, but none the less there is still a big problem.

In 2008, only one of the top eight countries with the greatest number of organ donors per capita had an opt-in system. All the others had opt-out systems, so there is strong evidence that such systems can increase the number of donations. In 2017, we know that 1,100 families refused to allow an organ donation because they were not sure whether their relatives would have wanted to donate. My hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) made the important point that asking people to make a proactive decision to donate at an incredibly emotional and difficult moment is harsh and unfair. I think that many families would later come to value the fact that a loved one’s organs had gone on to help someone else to live.

[Julian Knight]

Does my hon. Friend agree that sometimes in that situation, relatives could make a decision that they later regret, because in the emotion of the moment, they might not make the decision to say, “Let’s go ahead and make the donation.”?

[Neil O'Brien]

I absolutely agree.

Let us also think about the medical staff who need to have these incredibly difficult conversations. A long time ago, I was a medical student. I remember the first time I ever saw someone who had died and the medical staff’s incredibly difficult conversations with his family in the hospital. Imagine then having to ask the family to make the donation of an organ to save another life. It is almost an unbelievable thing to have to ask people to do.

We know that, since the introduction of the opt-out system in Wales, the number of deceased donors is up from 60 to 74. Those are small numbers, but none the less that is a rise of 23%. It is early days, but the opt-out system does seem to help. Obviously, we need the safeguards that my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull described, but at the end of the day, the Bill will save lives—it is as simple as that.

It is ironic that often on a Friday, when there are relatively few of us here, we talk about matters of life and death. This is one of them. This Bill will save lives. It means more careers, more lives and more ninth birthdays. If I can have a moment of poetry, it is what one poet called the

“million-petalled flower of being here”.

This Bill will save people’s lives, and it is a pleasure to support it.