Contribution
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, raised some interesting points in this group of amendments. I do not have the noble Lord’s experience of local councils—I declare that I am president of the LGA, but that is largely an honorary role—but I have a lot of experience of wheelchair services. I also declare that I am president of the Wheelchair Alliance.
A service that should be incredibly easy to provide has become one of the most complex parts of NHS funding. In the good old days, when I was a child, there were two choices of chair: a small one and a large one. These days, because we want to provide better wheelchairs for people, which is a good thing, the commissioning and provision of those services has become complicated, and in different areas different prices are paid for exactly the same chair. My concern is that, if we cannot do that for something as simple as wheelchair services, how are we going to do it for this process? Many wheelchairs should be provided within 18 weeks, but I know cases where it has taken years to provide a chair for a child. We should learn from previous experience.
Some noble Lords have mentioned the potential competition that could come from funding for this service and the challenges for palliative care. However, the consensus among several professional bodies, including the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Association for Palliative Medicine, is that assisted dying should have distinct funding. Others have mentioned the way that palliative care is currently funded in the UK, but Nancy Preston, who gave oral evidence as well as written evidence co-written with a professor at Lancaster, Suzanne Ost, expressed concern that it would communicate the wrong symbolic message.
I am one of the seven Peers who were in the Observer for my number of amendments. I am receiving lots of emails telling me I need to uphold the will of the people, but I am not sure the people have been asked how they would like to reprioritise the funding of the NHS. I accept that lot of people think the service is needed, but are they being given the choice of what else they might lose? The comments by Stephen Kinnock, who said there needs to be reprioritisation, were interesting. We need to be really clear what we are going to lose out on. The noble Lord, Lord Markham, made some interesting points about savings and cost, but for me that is more about how you schedule the payments and work through it.
I am more concerned about the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, about the incentive to encourage people to go down this route. In Belgium, the service is paid for through the national health and the doctors receive a fee of €180. The cost of the procedure in Canada is $2,327, and it is estimated that they spend about $22.3 million a year to put this service in place. They save $149 million, but for provincial healthcare that is a negligible saving—it is 0.08% of their budget.
Stephen Kinnock talked about doctors receiving a reasonable expense. I have raised the issue of “reasonable” in terms of the Equality Act before. What actually is it reasonable for a doctor to be paid? In Australia, 27% of the doctors were unpaid while 32% got direct state government reimbursement, but a conversation is going on there at the moment about whether clinicians should have to be altruistic to provide this service. Doctors are already talking about having a standardised price for a voluntary assisted dying assessment of $860 as an out-of-pocket expense. That is important because a lot of assumptions are being made about where this service is going to be provided. The reality is that if we are going to give people a choice, we need to give them a real choice.
This is probably going to come up in later groups as well, but I have also noticed a shift in the language, which originally talked about doctors and now we are talking about medical practitioners. Does this mean it could be physician assistants? Could it be nurses? Could someone else be trained to do this? Could there be a career path in this service? Might people think this a good step in their career? The reality is that somebody always pays: the question is just who and when.