Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)

The noble Baroness brings me neatly on to the second point I was going to make, which is that the lack of safeguards in Scotland precisely demonstrates the constitutional and practical difficulty of trying to legislate in Scotland while a number of those key safeguards are reserved matters to Westminster. Part of the reason the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the pharmacists came out decisively this week against the Scottish Bill was because it was not able to include enforceable conscience protections for health professionals that would, for example, have enabled them to refuse an instruction from their employer to participate in assisted dying. Instead, the mechanism that was forced, as it were, on the Scottish legislation was a Section 104 order, which would be subject to a future Westminster Government changing their mind. The Scottish Parliament was being asked to legislate for assisted dying, absent any Scottish safeguards for conscience and dependent on the future decisions of a Westminster Parliament. The noble Baroness neatly illustrates the point that there is a fundamental problem when one part of the United Kingdom seeks to go its own way. It is incapable of getting the necessary protections and that is one of the reasons why the measure was defeated. Amendment 887 in this group, which would withdraw the reference to Scotland from some of the measures, clearly makes sense given that the Scottish Parliament has just decided that it will not go down this path.