Lord Markham (Con)

I speak to my Amendment 132 and fully support the intention of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, which is trying not to add another layer to what we would all hope would be a streamlined process. With my amendment, I am trying to make a very simple point on proportionality: where there is an environmental assessment, there should be some sort of indication on how reasonable the cost within it is. We all know about the very famous £100 million High Speed 2 bat tunnel story. What we do not know is the cost per bat saved. As a former Health Minister, I am very familiar with being asked these questions in the health space all the time: which medicines should we approve? We have a process for this called NICE. It very explicitly puts the value of a human life at somewhere between £20,000 to £30,000 per year in terms of a quality adjusted life year. It will approve medicines if they cost less than that and will explicitly say that we cannot afford a medicine on the NHS if it is above that. It explicitly puts a value on a year of a human’s life, which leads to difficult discussions, conversations and analysis. You end up saying to people that, unfortunately, the state will not pay for a type of medicine even though it might be life-saving. We have put a value on a human life in that and we have made that open to public debate. We should have a similar reference point when talking about the environmental impact of the life of a bat or some other species, with reference to the value that we put on a human life. I am interested in the Minister’s views on what we can learn from the NICE debate in terms of proportionality, to make sure that we are not valuing the life of a bat, say, much more highly than the life of a human.