Baroness Lawlor (Con)

I thank the noble Lord. I hope to come to deal with that question. By contrast, all the Bill requires is the involvement of two doctors, neither of whom needs to be at the practice where the patient is registered or even has to have had prior knowledge of them before the process begins. Under the Bill as it stands, there is no connection between a doctor who knows the patient well and the process that leads to the assisted suicide. The other amendments in this group go some way to mitigating this, but it matters that there is a guaranteed role in the process for the doctor who may have known the patient. The Bill recognises that the patient’s GP may not wish, as a matter of conscience, to be involved in the process, but that does not mean that they or another doctor who knows the patient should not submit a letter to the process of the assessment panel as one of a number of documents seen by the multidisciplinary panel, which would be part of the public record of the assisted suicide. It will be in a different format—neither a checklist nor compiled from the hasty notes that GPs are obliged to write that they squeeze in between their 10-minute appointments. I turn to possible objections to these two-pronged amendments. First, the requirement that the same doctor has seen the patient six times over two years to allow adequate safeguards may be thought too much. Anything less would hardly amount to knowing the patient, the condition and their state of physical and mental health. It is feasible. Some evidence suggests that, on average, in 2018-19 patients had 3.3 face-to-face consultations per year with their GP, and 8.7 when every sort of consultation was taken into account. This data has not necessarily changed over the 20-year period of the study. Other data puts the face-to-face consultations lower, at 2.6, but these are averages. Very seriously ill people will have had far more consultations. Moreover, only face-to-face consultations, when the patient is physically with the doctor, give a good idea of physical and mental conditions as they develop. If the Bill is so amended, in answer to some problems that have been raised, it might encourage more face-to-face GP consultations with seriously ill patients. If there is a seriously ill patient and the GP retires, they might like to leave a letter providing the evidence over the period they saw them before they retire. But there will always be objections—