Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)

I would be interested to come back to that on Report when we have had a chance to investigate that point further. Fundamentally, this shows that there is a great problem, a structural problem, in trying to do these types of big social changes through Private Members’ Bills, be they in Scotland or England. The reason for that is that it requires concurrent action by the Governments of both nations. We have seen time and again that when these sorts of questions have arisen and we have posed these questions, we have been told by the Front Bench, for reasons we all understand, that amendments to try to deal with these problems pose workability concerns. Then we ask, “How would you address those workability concerns?” and answer comes there none, because the Government are officially neutral on the question. Dealing with these sorts of questions cannot be left to Private Members’ Bills when you cannot get to the bottom of the workability concerns or deal with the fact that, in order for the narrowly drawn legislation to work, there are a whole set of other things that have to be in place that only the Government can provide. I conclude on that point by noting that this past week we have seen a report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, once again on hospice and palliative care. It says: “There is an urgent need for reform to address the financial challenges that the independent adult hospice sector faces … The Department’s solution—the Modern Service Framework—is in the early stages of development, details are sketchy, and it is at least a year from being introduced. This is not good enough when so many hospices are announcing service cuts”. The idea that we should legislate when that is the context right now seems to me utterly ridiculous.