Speeches by Kinnock.

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. The purpose of amendment 457 is to exclude a person who has less than one month to live from being eligible for the shorter second period of reflection of 48 hours if that person has voluntarily stopped eating and drinking. That person would instead be required …”

“In order to ingest, there has to be self-administration. The self-administration is the precondition for ingesting the substance. That is my reading. I hope that that satisfies my hon. Friend.”

“I thank my hon. Friend, who speaks with considerable clinical expertise. It is about exactly that difference between self-administration and administration. If we cleave to those two principles, that is the basis on which we will achieve the stated aim of my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley.”

“The right hon. Member sets out clearly the difference between self-administration—the concept at the heart of the Bill—and the performance of the act either jointly or by the doctor. The latter is not permitted under the terms of the Bill; the former is. That is where we are.”

“What is hard to do in this Committee is imagine and agree on how many different scenarios there can be. Every circumstance and every individual experience will be different, so it is difficult for us to envision all the different scenarios. Nothing about this is easy, of course. We would not have been sitting in this B…”

“I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. The hon. Member for Solihull West and Shirley pointed out earlier that the scenario that he has just described would constitute more than assistance; it would be moving into administration by the doctor, rather than self-administration. I think that that aligns with the Go…”

“My interpretation is that it would not be, because if someone were actually tipping the pills into the mouth of the patient, they would be going through the act of putting the substance into the patient. This Bill is founded on the principle of self-administration. However, there are acts such as helping the patient to…”

“I will pretty much repeat what I have just said to my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford. There is a dividing line, as the Government see it, between assistance and administration. There is a dividing line between making the patient comfortable, enabling the procedure to take place, and the doctor actually putting the …”

“One of the fundamental principles of the Bill, which my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley has prioritised, is self-administration. It is not for me as a Minister to opine on that; it is simply there in the Bill. Once that fundamental principle is established, it is about defining what “assistance” means, compared …”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. Before I speak to amendments 497 and 498, on which the Government have worked with my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley, let me address amendments 462 and 463. Amendment 462 would amend clause 18 to require the co-ordinating doctor to explain to the person…”

“Clause 17(2) provides that where a notice or indication regarding a cancellation of a first or second declaration is given to a registered medical practitioner “at” the person’s GP practice, that practitioner must record the cancellation in the person’s medical records as soon as possible. Amendment 479 seeks to clarif…”

“The purpose of amendments 474 to 478 is to improve the drafting of the Bill by creating a new definition of “recordable event”. Recordable events are the events set out in clause 16(1) related to the recording of declarations and statements. The amendments would also make consequential changes to clause 16, which refer…”

“The Bill, once it becomes an Act, places a legal duty on the Secretary of State to produce those regulations. The Secretary of State would be in breach of the law if he were not to enforce the conclusions of the Act.”

“The regulations will have primacy, and will be shaped by a range of inputs, including the conversation we have just had in Committee. The process is that the Bill gets Royal Assent, then the regulations are drawn up based on a range of consultations and inputs—including the Hansard. The regulations then become the basi…”

“I am acutely conscious that every word we say in this Committee is on the record. My hon. Friend makes a valid point in that context. The purpose of amendment 253 is to clarify that a person acting as a proxy can both sign and revoke a declaration on behalf of a person seeking assistance under the Bill. This amendment …”

“I would not want to pre-empt the regulations, because clearly that is the point of the process. If this Bill gets Royal Assent, we then move on to making regulations, and I have confidence in the good offices of parliamentary counsel, legal advice and the drafting process. I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, ho…”

“I am not a lawyer, but thankfully I am sitting next to a very eminent and distinguished one—my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green—who has confirmed that everything the hon. Member for East Wiltshire said was correct from a legal standpoint, so I shall leave it at that. Clause 15(5) of the…”

“My job and that of my hon. and learned friend the Justice Minister is to defend the integrity and coherence of the statute. The concern that we have with the word “complication” is that it is a wide-ranging term and concept, and its inclusion could potentially undermine the integrity of the legal coherence of the Bill …”

“Absolutely, if the Committee chooses to accept the amendment, it goes into the Bill. If the Bill gets Royal Assent, it becomes the responsibility of the Government to ensure that the Bill, as passed by Parliament, is implemented in the best possible way. The hon. Lady is right that the Government’s responsibility is to…”

“I think what I am saying is that the word “complication” contains a multitude of potential interpretations and meanings. The work that would need to be done by the Government to unpack it and understand what it means certainly could be done if the amendment passes, but the Government are saying that, as it stands, it i…”