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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support this amendment, as I did when it was moved in Committee. One of the most important aspects of this is that NICE guidelines would apply if the infertility services in an area were brought within the National Health Service. There is a much greater tendency to apply them when the work is done in the National Health Service. I suppose that I agree with my noble friend that, in a sense, the best statistics are those which show the availability of these services in an area rather than whether the gross numbers are different. The latter might be explained by differences in the level of requests in each area. Therefore, the statistics might need to be refined. The amendment, which echoes the spirit of the one that was moved in Committee, does the compulsion, if I may call it that, in a more gentle way than was originally proposed. Just requiring strategic health authorities to report is a gentle, but probably very effective, way of finding out what they are doing in this area.