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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, we have an opportunity here, but I hope that we do not take it. Let me try to explain why. I have some interests to declare. I was a founder member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and later its chair. I stood down when I started to chair the Nuffield Foundation. So, for more than 15 years, I have been looking at what it really takes to enable a body to achieve independence. I do not say that that has been perfectly achieved, but it is very difficult to achieve, and that is one of the aims spoken about by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. We need to think about structures much more carefully than we can today in an amendment to an already complex Bill. Six to eight people is a very small number. Is the whole of human bioethics to be separated from other parts of bioethics? Constantly one finds overlap between human issues and concerns of animal welfare: let us think of xenotransplantation. One continually finds overlaps between human issues and environmental issues and one now finds issues of bioethics that stray into public health. In the broader—perhaps I should say the narrower—academic world where I come from, people now talk about broad bioethics; that is, uniting human, environmental and public health issues. The remit of such a committee is important. In the mean time, a large range of bodies in this country address particular parts of this remit. Some are publicly funded and some are charitably funded. Between them, they cover the waterfront moderately well. However, there are some things that they cannot do. One of the main things that they cannot do is to have influence, whereas perhaps the US and German bioethics commissions can. Whether having influence is the primary function of bioethics committees, I am unsure. I felt that they should have sought influence when, in the mid-1990s, we published a report on the medical and scientific uses of human tissues and could not get certain departments of state to listen to our worries, which later had unfortunate consequences at Alder Hey and elsewhere and, later still, led to what I still regard as one of the more unfortunate pieces of legislation that Parliament has passed in recent years—perhaps there is some competition. We need to think much harder before we launch into a national committee. We need to think about what areas of bioethics such a committee should consider. Where are the boundaries? How should it be staffed? Who are the people who should be there? How many would be needed to do a serious job? Could they really then be expected to carry the many additional functions that this amendment would assign to them? If they took on these public engagement and education functions, could they be expected to preserve that form of neutrality that is initially described? As the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, has said, would it not in the end come back to Parliament—I hope with a free vote—to make decisions on these matters? I believe that it would. Although I am not wholly hostile to this proposal, I am open to being convinced. We need to think far more seriously about what you have to do to secure independence, which I do not think is easy, how one achieves that across time and how one achieves proper connection with the public.