Lord Moylan (Con)

With respect, it is true that the report, which the noble Lord has obviously read carefully, does not include data from GPs or from 111. That would have been an onerous task and, as the Government have said, this was a first and experimental effort. This is an argument for going further and improving the collection of that data, not for giving up the attempt altogether and seeing it as a conspiracy, which is what the noble Lord appeared to do. We are really all on one page about this—or at least he and I seem to be. What is so strange about the advocates of choice in this debate is that they are so defensive; they speak as if they are surrounded by conspiracy. I do not actually think they are. If I thought I was surrounded by conspiracy, I would want to live in a world of facts and not hide myself from them, which is what they seem to be doing. The proposal is that data produced by an arm of the NHS should continue to be produced, whether by statutory or administrative means. That is all it is. I know that there are other things happening today, so I turn finally to the remarks of the Minister. I am grateful to her for being one of the few people to treat the Bill seriously and to look at what the words in it say. She wandered slightly from that into the worlds of strange contexts, but in fact a great deal of her speech was an echo of my speech. On the history and the factual and contextual issues here, we are largely agreed. I agree that the Bill exceptionalises abortion to some extent because, as I said, abortion is exceptional, in that its statistics are generated from different data sources, which is very different from the majority of NHS procedures that take place inside a hospital. I grant that the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, has a point that there are other exceptional cases. I did not say that abortion was unique; I said it was exceptional. There are differences between the two words, and he is right about some hip operations and so forth taking place in the private sector, where similar issues might arise as well. The Minister says that there are different and other ways of collecting these statistics: non-statutory means. I conceded that point, too, in my opening remarks. What she did not say is that she would use a different, non-statutory means of collecting these statistics. I remind her that when she signs her letters, underneath her name it says: “Minister for Patient Safety and Women’s Health”. We need better statistics on complications arising from abortions. I am disappointed that the Minister has not committed herself to that and agreed that, even if a Bill is not necessary for this purpose, she will set herself to do so. Sadly, she has not.