Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for bringing this debate to the Floor. I declare my interests as chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland, and I have been involved with the Scottish Government on neurological conditions and policies for many years. What has struck me in the debate so far is something that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said about concentrating on the interests of the person. This is what I see every day when I deal with vulnerable people and they are dealing with service providers, whether in health, education, housing or whatever. I take the point your Lordships have made that this debate is about the difference between “capacity” and “ability”; capacity, as we define it in the Mental Capacity Act, is something that professionals will assess. They have lots of experience of doing that, and that is great. However, if we come back to concentrating on the interests of the person, the person is quite often in this difficult, complex situation for the very first time. Therefore, as my noble friend Lord Deben said, their ability to take on complex information, potentially when there might be multiple comorbidities and issues going on, is very different. We see it in children in education and in people with communication difficulties—I have an amendment later on about how we support people with communication difficulties to navigate this. But we see it every day with the ability of people to take on something really profound that professionals are used to talking about—and we are professionals in here; we can talk about definitions and how we define things in legislation. I wanted to question whether people in the street that will be dealing with this have the ability to understand all the options, the prognoses and everything in front of them.