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Mr. Speaker:
I am grateful to the hon. and learned Member for giving me notice of his point of order. The
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matter that he raises, however serious it may be in his eyes, does not affect the privileges of the House and so is not something on which I can rule. Because he is learned, the hon. Member is better able than I am to make a judgment about the legal implications of this incident. I have no doubt that he will do so.
Mr. Jonathan Sayeed (Mid-Bedfordshire) (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. On Monday to Thursday every week, you preside over Question Time. This is meant to be an opportunity for Members of the legislature to question members of the Executive on policy, to seek information from members of the Executive and to press for action by the Executive. However, over the past few years, the standard of answers has declined to such an extent that Question Time appears to many to be an exercise in evasion, misrepresentation and obfuscation. Indeed, I would argue that too many of the answers given to parliamentary questions are designed to deceive rather than to illuminate the decisions of the Government. This, I am sure you will agree, damages Parliament and demonstrates contempt for the principle of democratic accountability.
I would therefore like you, Mr. Speaker, to consider whether, with the permission of the House, you can be given additional powers to remedy the situation. Specifically, if a Minister gives a manifestly inadequate answer to a question, you could direct the Minister to answer the question again and give a more informative answer. The very existence of such a sanction would, I believe, encourage civil servants to draft answers that seek to assist the scrutiny of Government rather than, as at present, frustrate the very proper and essential examination by Parliament of the Government of the day.
Mr. Speaker: The hon. Member uses his point of order to make a radical suggestion, namely that I should be authorised to adjudicate on the quality of answers and direct a Minister to try again if I judge an answer to be inadequate. This is a matter for the House, and he may wish to put his suggestion to the Procedure Committee. However, I cannot say that I am enthusiastic about such a proposal. I also observe that the quality of an answer is often influenced by the quality of the question.
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): Further to the point of order raised by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), Mr. Speaker. I am sure that you are not suggesting in any way that a mere ministerial written statement smuggled on to the Order Paper in the dead of the morning is any substitute for a Minister coming to the House to give a proper oral statement on which questions may be asked by Members of Parliament. It would be regrettable if you had left any impression whatever—however inadvertently—that you believed that a written ministerial statement is a proper substitute for an oral statement with questions.
Mr. Speaker:
The right hon. Member knows me well enough to know that I enjoy Ministers coming to the Dispatch Box to give an account of their stewardship. However, we cannot have oral statements all the time; sometimes there will be written statements. That is not too bad when they give good news, and the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) received good news on this occasion.
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Orders of the Day
CONSOLIDATED FUND (APPROPRIATION) BILL
Order for Second Reading read.
Question, That the Bill be now read a Second time, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 56 (Consolidated Fund Bills), and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Question, That the Bill be now read the Third time, put forthwith, and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.
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Human Tissue Bill
As amended in the Standing Committee, considered.
New Clause 7
'(1) If the High Court is satisfied—
(a) that relevant material has come from the body of a living person,
(b) that it is not reasonably possible to trace the person from whose body the material has come ("the donor"),
(c) that it is desirable in the interests of another person (including a future person) that the material be used for the purpose of obtaining scientific or medical information about the donor, and
(d) that there is no reason to believe—
(i) that the donor has died,
(ii) that a decision of the donor to refuse to consent to the use of the material for that purpose is in force, or
(iii) that the donor lacks capacity to consent to the use of the material for that purpose,
it may order that subsection (2) apply to the material for the benefit of the other person.
(2) Where material is the subject of an order under subsection (1), there shall for the purposes of this Part be deemed to be consent of the donor to the use of the material for the purpose of obtaining scientific or medical information about him which may be relevant to the person for whose benefit the order is made.
(3) The Secretary of State may by regulations enable the High Court, in such circumstances as the regulations may provide, to make an order deeming there for the purposes of this Part to be appropriate consent to an activity consisting of—
(a) the storage of the body of a deceased person for use for the purpose of research in connection with disorders, or the functioning, of the human body,
(b) the use of the body of a deceased person for that purpose,
(c) the removal from the body of a deceased person, for use for that purpose, of any relevant material of which the body consists or which it contains,
(d) the storage for use for that purpose of any relevant material which has come from a human body, or
(e) the use for that purpose of any relevant material which has come from a human body.'.—[Ms Rosie Winterton.]
Brought up, and read the First time.
3.41 pm
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Ms Rosie Winterton): I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr. Speaker : With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendments Nos. 85 to 98.
Ms Winterton:
The intention of the new clause and the amendments is to ensure that there will, in the last resort, be a way to gain access to human tissue without consent if that is really needed in the interest of individuals whose health might benefit thereby or the health of the general public. We listened to discussions in Committee on the matter and the concerns of the medical and scientific community. Following further
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consideration, we propose to provide that the High Court may dispense with the consent requirement in certain exceptional circumstances.
Part 1 of the Bill requires consent for the use of tissue for scheduled purposes, including
"Obtaining scientific or medical information . . . which may be relevant to any other person".
Clause 46 will make it an offence to analyse DNA without qualifying consent. In both cases, the consent of a living person will be required for the use of his or her tissue for such a purpose.
Geneticists, in particular, have raised concerns with Ministers about situations—albeit infrequent ones—in which individuals are untraceable, but the analysis of their tissue samples is necessary to predict the likelihood of a relative having a genetic condition or to help to diagnose and treat a relative. If the original provider of tissue were alive and contactable, consent could be sought. However, if the original person were not contactable because relatives had lost touch, for one reason or another, a problem would clearly arise. We appreciate that in such a situation, the treatment of the relative could be unnecessarily delayed or compromised, so we propose to amend the Bill to allow a court order to be sought so that the need for consent could be waived in the circumstances that I have described.
Such a situation would arise if an existing stored sample needed to be tested to help to diagnose or treat a relative, but when consent for the sample to be used in such a way was neither given nor refused and efforts to trace the original person had failed. The original person would also, as far as was known, have to be alive and competent to give consent.
Members of the medical research community have also drawn attention to the need for a mechanism to waive the requirement for consent to use tissue from living or deceased persons in exceptional cases when that is in the public interest. The reason for needing such a waiver would be to enable consent to be dispensed with in unexpected and exceptional cases where the potential benefit to the health of the public of undertaking some research without consent outweighs the risk of harm to the rights of the individuals concerned. That might be needed, for example, where a person has died as a result of a new virus and relatives who may be asked for permission to take tissue for testing cannot be found. In the event of some new highly infectious disease similar to Ebola, for example, it would be necessary to do research using samples taken from those who had died from the disease. Their relatives may not be available to give consent.
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