Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, I shall focus my remarks on two points. One is that I thought the speech of my noble friend Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest was very powerful. I strongly support what she said about proper safeguards for people with learning disabilities and she has an amendment which deals with that. But I really want to test the thinking here, because there is a view, and this is where I settled, on whether medical professionals should be able to raise things proactively. What I was thinking through—I would be interested in what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, thinks—is that the Bill is obviously about, first, legalising assistance to help someone take their own life, but it is also about putting a process in place, and those are two separate things. I was also thinking about the thing that is currently lawful, which is that someone is able to take their own life if they do not require assistance. I do not know whether it is just me but, if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness and suggested to a medical practitioner that you were thinking of taking your own life if the Bill were not in force, as far as I understand it—there are many in this House who can correct me—the medical practitioner has a duty under various existing suicide prevention strategies to take steps to try to prevent you taking your own life. They are absolutely not supposed to help you; they are supposed to try to stop you, up to and including using provisions in the Mental Health Act.