Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 120 and the amendments consequential to it. I should explain at the outset that my remarks incorporate the concerns of my noble friend Lord Farmer, who regrets that he is unable to be here. We are both worried, as I know are many other noble Lords, about current capacity and other pressures on the family courts. We are particularly concerned that these amendments would increase capacity pressures still further by placing decision-making and sign-off for applications for assisted dying orders into the Family Division of the High Court. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, mentioned safety. Notwithstanding his reference to 40-plus circuit judges and a cohort of recorders, I fear that what is before us is a recipe for overwhelming a system that already shows grave signs of being overloaded. Noble Lords will know that, for some considerable time, my noble friend Lord Farmer has been pressing this and previous Governments to cite early legal advice and support in family hubs when families separate, to ease pressure precisely because of existing capacity issues. Moreover, the National Audit Office recently said of the family justice system: “The government … does not have an overall assessment of the main drivers of delays or the capacity required to manage the system efficiently and reduce delay. MoJ, DfE and others have carried out several reviews … to identify causes of delay in family justice, identifying more than 25 different contributing factors … but most of the reviews could not quantify the scale and impact of each issue on overall performance, or the resources required to deal with these causes efficiently, due to data limitations”.