Member

These sorts of issues all start to raise questions on how these safeguards would really work. The panels in the Bill are, I think, due to be held in public, although in debating amendments we learned that, at the request of the applicant, they could be in private. Going further on amendments, we discovered that it was the intention of the Bill sponsors that, in fact, it would all be in private and, by the way, there could be pre-recorded audio. That started to paint, for me, quite a different picture of how the panels, or indeed other parts of the process, would really check whether coercion was happening or had happened. Well-trained social workers do not just read reports; when they go to visit somebody, they are looking for different signals. It is only by tabling amendments and having significant debate on those sorts of details that we started to understand how this might work in practice—a panel being available 24/7 on Teams, potentially. These things came out only as a result of going into detail, recognising that all the information that we had asked to be released had not been.