Lord Scriven (LD)

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for this Bill. He may not realise that he has highlighted an important issue that needs to be addressed—not the limited and, I may say, misguided focus of this Bill, but the wider issue of robustness of health datasets and the reliability of statistics used to plan, improve and deliver safe services as part of our healthcare system. As a former health services manager, I have taken an interest in this for a long time. The NHS is one of the most data-rich healthcare systems in the world, yet some of its datasets suffer from weaknesses that can impede its ability to deliver high-quality, data-driven care. These weaknesses can broadly be categorised into areas of data quality, interoperability, accessibility and governance. One of the fundamental challenges lies in the inconsistency and incompleteness of data. NHS datasets often include outdated, duplicated or incorrect information due to variations in how data is recorded across trusts and practices. For example, patient demographics, diagnosis or treatment codes and records might be inconsistently documented, making it difficult to draw accurate insights. This runs into thousands of conditions and treatments, not just this one, which I hazard an educated guess has not been randomly plucked for the attention of this Bill. When you add in the private sector, it becomes near impossible to provide a complete patient journey through statistics to help improve patient care. If the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and his supporters want to improve healthcare outcomes for not just women but everyone, and safety and policy built on better data, their Bill should focus on legislating to improve data quality in the NHS. It should be about adopting national standards for data quality, promoting interoperability, enhancing accessibility, strengthening governance and transparency and leveraging advanced analytics. So why pick out just one treatment among thousands with poor and conflicting data in our healthcare system and make the exception of trying to report it to this Parliament? The noble Lord’s reason for exceptionability does not stand up: 55% of ophthalmology cases are provided by the private sector and 30,000 hip replacements are provided by the healthcare sector. This Bill is a back-door attempt to limit abortion in this country, using statistical jiggery-pokery as a smokescreen. I say sorry to the noble Lord and his supporters, but this just will not wash. The real motives need to be exposed. It is telling that the majority of those actively campaigning for this Bill are the very organisations that are prominent in attempts to restrict or, in some cases, ban abortion in this country. These Benches will support genuine and effective measures to improve datasets in our healthcare system, to improve safety and outcomes for not just women but all patients, but we will not support the ideas of this Bill, which are not a foundation for effective improvement in healthcare and healthcare safety. We need to be clear: this Bill will not deal with the underlying weaknesses of healthcare datasets. It is the first step in an agenda to restrict women’s choice and, in some cases, restrict abortion altogether.