Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My noble friend Lord Harper is absolutely right: he is still with us, but he is absent for the moment. It might have been that, when he was given his diagnosis that he had six months to live, he was told that his final months would be very grim indeed and he would suffer terribly. He might, if this Bill had been in place, have made the decision to end his life. That was 32 years ago and my noble friend Lord Polak is actually pretty fit and doing a good job in your Lordships’ House. So we have to question medical diagnosis in this case. I am very concerned and would like to hear from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, what he thinks about the problems of wrong diagnosis. I am old enough to remember that there was a time when we had capital punishment in this country. One of the reasons why it was abolished was because of the miscarriages of justice and the number of people who were hanged when they were innocent. That was a very serious lever used to get rid of capital punishment. What percentage of misdiagnosis of terminal illness would the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, think would be right before he thought about whether the whole basis of this Bill was to be questioned? I do not think we have any statistics on misdiagnosis—maybe he has some—but it really undermines the whole basis of this Bill if we have doctors who quite innocently say that they think a person has only six months to live but then find that they have not and they live on much longer. This is a matter of tremendous concern to people in this country.