Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)

I am surprised to hear that. I will make inquiries, but I am almost sure that that will not be the case with this. The noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay, gave us an interesting tour d’horizon of the law and said how “ordinarily resident” applies in various areas. “Ordinarily resident” means the same thing in all those areas. For the reasons I have already given, I do not think it will prove a difficult thing to apply in practice. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Meston, for his endorsement of the approach to “ordinarily resident”. The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, asked me a number of questions, such as about the citizen who was ordinarily resident here and then went to live abroad—I think that was the case raised by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. If a person decided that they were going to move to Spain and live the rest of their days there, then when they become ill they wanted to come back and have an assisted death, under the terms of this Bill they would not be eligible because they would not have been ordinarily resident in this country for 12 months—this country being England and Wales. The noble Lord’s second question was about somebody from Northern Ireland who comes here and asks for an assisted death. Again, they would not be eligible because the assumption under his question was that that person’s ordinary residence was in Northern Ireland. His third question was about why opinion is not satisfied. It seemed to us that opinion is enough in relation to this because it would be done basically by asking a number of questions and you would assume that the answers that you had would be honest.