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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, perhaps I may share with the House my experience as a Health Minister who commissioned a paper on whether we should move towards a bioethics commission. I shall not divulge the personal views that were offered to me. However, I received a paper on the proposal, I considered it and I discussed it with the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. It might be worth sharing some of the reasons why I decided that it was not a good idea to proceed with the proposal. I have to acknowledge that if you are a busy Minister and wrestling with some of the difficult issues around ethics in NHS research and development, in the Human Tissue Bill, in genetics et cetera, then there is something extremely attractive in the idea of being able to outsource some of those issues. I do not dismiss that attraction. However, when it comes to grappling with the specific points in taking that forward, you have to confront some rather uncomfortable issues. If this commission were to be set up, what range and diversity of membership would make it an authoritative body that carries credence with the public, has a wide diversity of opinion and would be authoritative enough to be useful to Governments of all and varied persuasions? The truth is that you need a very large body indeed to produce that kind of authoritative body. The idea that you could do that with between six and eight members, I say to the noble Baroness, just does not stand up to detailed scrutiny. You also have to look, as I did, at the experience of other countries that have gone down this route. I say to the noble Baroness, for whom I have the highest regard, that I thought she was a bit selective about the virtues of some of those other countries. One of the most damning reasons for not proceeding was the experience in the United States. I do not wish to take a tour of the world, but other areas, a little closer to home, also do not bear quite as close scrutiny as the noble Baroness might think. We therefore have the problem of whether such a body, particularly if it were a small body, could be captured. As the noble Baroness may know, we in the Labour Party we are rather expert in entryism; we have quite a lot of experience in that area. There is therefore an issue—dare I say it to some of my colleagues in other parts of the House—about whether faith-based organisations would seek to capture some of these bodies. Uncomfortable stuff though it is, I have to say, based on the experience of other organisations overseas, there is a risk. Scientists themselves are extremely diverse. A membership of between six and eight would not allow much capacity for a wide range of scientific views, opinions and expertise to be incorporated in such a body. Moreover, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, makes a very important point, as does my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws: the ground is already quite well covered by quite a lot of bodies. If you are a Minister, you are not short of people offering you advice in these areas. I agree that the advice sometimes conflicts, but nevertheless there is no shortage of people coming to you with expert advice in many of these areas. The Human Genetics Commission has done remarkably good work in this area. The regulators, even though they are regulators, do themselves bring something to bear in these areas because of their experience in dealing with the regulatory issues. The Nuffield Council produces very measured reports after a lot of consultation and research. That is all available, both in the public arena and to Parliament. One of the issues that I thought was overwhelmingly important was that we did not try to escape from the fact that elected politicians and appointed politicians need to wrestle with these issues. Parliament needs to wrestle with them. Sometimes it is uncomfortable for many elected politicians to wrestle with these issues. They would prefer that things should go away. In a sense, however, that is the important part of a democracy—that we have these issues out in the open and bring them to Parliament. If we are to go down the path of a new body, it should be something that is enshrined in Parliament. It should be a parliamentary debating capability rather than something off-shored to help us out with difficult issues. We need to wrestle with them as parliamentarians.