Lord Empey (UUP)

My Lords, I have put my name to some of these amendments. In the spirit of what the Chief Whip said, I will not repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, said, but I gently remind the Committee that this Private Member’s Bill is not normal, in so far as most Private Member’s Bills are five, six, seven or eight pages. This one is 51 pages, with 59 clauses. It is a very different animal from what we are used to. I think the amendments in this group have been tabled because, in many respects, this aspect of the process is deeply disturbing. We are talking about life and death here; we are talking about making assessments of a person who is making an application for an assisted death. Noble Lords will be aware that, on 29 October, in the Select Committee, Professor Martin J Vernon, chair of the British Geriatrics Society’s ethics and law special interest group, said: “Assessing somebody remotely, digitally, without a face-to-face assessment, particularly if they have complex health and social care needs, is nigh-on impossible”. I would have thought that, to assess somebody’s state of mind and to have any sense of judging whether they are being coerced or not, one of the most obvious things is to see them in front of you and get the feel for that. How can a psychiatrist judge this? The other point I would make is about the practicalities. Depending on where someone is in this country, they may or may not have the equipment or the capacity to use it; signals drop off. Inevitably, if somebody is in a frail and unstable condition, there will have to be other people present to operate this. Does that mean that a team from the hospital would have to go out to some remote location—or, even worse, are we doing stuff on the phone? Can you imagine how people would react? “Dial-a-death” would be the sort of way that people would describe it.