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Coroners and Justice Bill

It may be appropriate to have two or three sentences from someone who once held the huge and wonderful office of Secretary of State for Health. I want to associate myself warmly, which was not always the case when I was Secretary of State, with the views of the BMA, as so eloquently expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. We have to be realistic. We have heard the phrase "predatory families"; there are also such things as predatory bureaucracies. The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, said most exactly what worries me. This would open the way to a shift in perception across the board, and it would begin to shift the perception within the appalling decisions that have to be made about resource allocation within health services. It would open another front. The health service bureaucracy has to be able to rule that kind of resource allocation out by saying that that is not something that we will consider. We have heard wonderful examples today from patients, doctors, nurses and lawyers. All the individuals who work within these bureaucracies are of course sanctified, particularly when they are in your Lordships’ House. But bureaucracies do not have souls, and given broad signals, they can move quite quickly in ways that individuals looking at hard cases had originally not envisaged. I urge noble Lords to keep this light on red, as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, put it so eloquently.