Naz Shah
MP for Bradford West · Labour · United Kingdom
“Outside of this conflict, I have stood shoulder to shoulder with the minority Christian community in Jaranwala in Pakistan against their persecution. The justice that I believe in means that I have a moral duty to stand with them too.”
“There is also a fundamental question about Israel’s legal authority to take that action. It is not the British embassy in Israel; it is the British consulate general, which represents the United Kingdom in Jerusalem, the west bank and Gaza, and conducts our relations with Palestine.”
“What is it like to live in a conflict zone where someone who is a journalist, like Hamza al-Dahdouh, can be killed in an Israeli airstrike, or, like Shireen Abu Akleh, can be shot dead while doing their job? Years later there is still no accountability to bring about justice for their families.”
“We also have a particular historic and moral responsibility when it comes to Israel and Palestine, given the Balfour declaration, the British mandate and our country’s historical role in the region. But even putting that history aside, whether we like it or not, conflicts elsewhere affect the lives of people right here in Britain.”
“I also want to bring to the House’s attention today’s report by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group. It is the most comprehensive report to date on the west bank, gathering evidence from over three decades of Israel’s human rights violations and 2,000 testimonies since October 2023. The report is called “The Elimination Project”.”
“Their deaths show the extraordinary danger faced by aid workers trying to feed civilians in a warzone. Israel acknowledged serious failures in the strike and dismissed two officers, yet the families of the World Central Kitchen workers have called for independent accountability—that call is falling on deaf ears.”
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“When we were discussing this option, he told me really clearly that she has opted for a cremation, which would cost less money, just because she internalised that idea of burden and she did not want a cost for those that she left behind. She had not seen a doctor for 40 years. That brought home the idea of internalised coercion, internalised pressure and mistrust, because he also talked about what happened during covid. We had an interesting conversation. I told him that it was interesting that he had said that, and today I am talking about it. That is the reality: it is about how people perceive healthcare provision, the potential inequalities, and what the barriers are to access—all the preconceived ideas that we have about the provision of healthcare.”
“After talking to the patients in ethnic minority and other disadvantaged groups, she said: “Overwhelmingly, racialised communities expressed deep concerns that they would be more likely to be pushed towards AD through systemic biases and societal attitudes about whose lives are valued… While safeguards were acknowledged, many remained sceptical that they would be applied fairly and equitably, fearing that vulnerable individuals, particularly those who lack strong advocates or English proficiency, might be at greater risk of being guided towards AD rather than offered appropriate care options.” I want to share something with the Committee. We often get taxis to and from work and home; I got into a cab yesterday, and the chap who was driving was called Dave. His 84-year-old aunt died on Friday.”
“Another option is for the NHS to fund a specialised assisted dying service that would be separate from its other functions. That could potentially be feasible, but it could also represent a significant cost for the NHS, because we still have not had the impact assessment from the Government and we have no idea how significant that cost may be. There is also the worry that if assisted dying becomes available on the NHS, some people will become too frightened to access palliative care, as was outlined to the Committee by Dr Jamilla Hussain. I will read a brief part of her written evidence to the Committee.”
“The Royal College of General Practitioners said in its written evidence that “any assisted dying service should be seen as a standalone specialised service that healthcare professionals may opt to provide with additional training and should not be deemed core GP work.” The royal college’s advice, which is founded on the views of its members, means that we should give very strong consideration to putting assisted dying outside the normal workings of the NHS. If we do that, it seems that there are a few options. One is for the Secretary of State to invite private firms to tender for contracts and administer assisted dying services. As I have said, there are very strong reasons why we should not plan to have private firms work under contract to the NHS to provide assisted dying; for me, that it is one of the worst possible options.”
“I strongly support the general principle that if we do have assisted dying, it should be free at the point of use. If this House decides that people do indeed have the right to an assisted death under the conditions that this Bill sets out, then it should not be something limited to those who can afford private healthcare. There are, however, strong objections among general practitioners to providing assisted dying as part of their services, and I do not think we should plan to have private firms work under contract from the NHS to provide assisted dying either.”
“It is interesting to follow the hon. Member for Richmond Park, because I rise to speak to amendment 537, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley. The amendment goes further than the hon. Member for Richmond Park would as far as local authorities are concerned. The amendment also concerns both the national health service and the provision of healthcare by charities. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley knows both fields extremely well. She was the director of quality and strategy and chief analyst at the Department of Health, and then had a senior role at the Centre for Ageing Better. Her amendment would mean that assisted dying services could be provided only by charitable organisations and not by the national health service.”
“My hon. Friend says that this will be explicitly commissioned. I completely agree with everything he has said, but this will be a newly designed service by definition, so will that not leave the door open for new providers, such as Serco or G4S, to come in, design a new service and bring in the expertise to deliver it?”
“We are spending hours and hours going through hypotheticals and possibilities—this could happen, that could happen—but there is nothing actually before us.”
“I stopped myself intervening on my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central; I had lots of questions, and he has confused me even more. He referred to the provision in clause 8(6)(d) about the doctors being different. If I am right, healthcare providers such as Aspire or Ramsay Health Care could be commissioned to deliver the services. If so, does that mean, as the hon. Member for East Wiltshire suggested, that we will need two separate doctors or providers because the co-ordinating doctor and the second doctor cannot be linked? That confuses me even further. After what we have heard this morning, it strikes me that we do not have any proposed model and the measure has not been thought through. It speaks to the idea that this is not right.”
“I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I have observed two things this morning. First, the reality has really hit home. Are we going to look at the amendment regarding local authorities providing the service? Are we excluding private providers? Are we excluding big firms? A new service has to be designed. Will it be two organisations or one? How will the Bill be delivered? We do not even have that before us, and that concerns me deeply.”
“However, I must ask: why does the Bill say that the Secretary of State “may” pass such regulations? The best interpretation I can think of is that a future Health Secretary might decide that private firms should provide assisted dying services directly to paying customers rather than via outsourced NHS contracts. In that case, the Health Secretary would need to provide regulations for those private sector services. If that interpretation is correct, surely we could have tighter wording. For example, the new clause could say that if the Secretary of State decides to allow private firms to provide assisted dying to paying customers, the Secretary of State must make regulations to govern that. I would welcome clarification on the point, because I know that my hon.”
“To make such a fundamental change to the NHS, we should have had the best possible evidence and proper consultation, not three days of witness hearings and then hundreds of pieces of written evidence, often published after we had finished discussing the topics to which they relate. That is nowhere near good enough. The next set of powers that I want to talk about is mentioned in subsection (3) of new clause 36, which says that the Health Secretary “may by regulations make other provision about voluntary assisted dying services in England (whether or not the services are commissioned VAD services).” I absolutely accept that if we have assisted dying services in England, the Health Secretary should ensure that they are properly regulated. That will have to include privately provided services as well as those offered on the NHS.”
“I think that, to prevent that happening, my hon. Friend has proposed subsection (1) of new clause 36. If there is any other reason why she has suggested that we should give those powers to the Secretary of State, it is important that the Committee understands and hears it. What is proposed underlines just how major a change the Bill would make. Since the NHS started operations in 1948, we have had a clear understanding of what it is there for. The 2006 Act is little different from the 1946 Act in that respect. For nearly 80 years, we have had an NHS that is there to improve health and to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. The fact that we may have to change that shows us that we are taking a very big step indeed.”
“Those duties have been the basis of how the NHS has been run for the nearly eight decades for which it has existed. My hon. Friend’s Bill would give the Secretary of State powers to change the duties set out in section 1(1) of the 2006 Act. I ask my hon. Friend and both Ministers why the Bill needs to give the Secretary of State those powers. The only reason I can think of is that someone who was part of the drafting process has pointed out that the Health Secretary’s current duties might be incompatible with assisted dying. The Health Secretary has duties to secure improvement in the people’s physical and mental health and in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness. Someone could bring a legal challenge on the basis that assisted dying does not fit with that duty, and that challenge might well succeed.”
“It states: “The Secretary of State must continue the promotion in England of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement— (a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and (b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.” That Act is an adaptation of the original National Health Service Act 1946, section 1(1) of which states: “It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health…to promote the establishment in England and Wales of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness”. The 1946 and 2006 Acts both give the Health Secretary a very clear set of duties that I think we can all support.”
“As I understand it, the wording means that assisted dying services could be provided directly by the NHS or by private firms working on contract for the NHS. I will discuss those powers in the order in which I mentioned them. Subsection (4) of new clause 36 says that the Health Secretary may pass regulations that “may for example provide that specified references in the National Health Service Act 2006 to the health service continued under section 1(1) of that Act include references to commissioned VAD services.” To make it clear how the new clause works, I will quote from the subsection of the National Health Service Act 2006 that it would affect.”
“Friend explained, new clause 36 outlines the powers that the Secretary of State for Health would have over voluntary assisted dying services in England. New clause 37 does the same for Wales, but makes changes that are necessary because health is a devolved power. I will concentrate on new clause 36, as I represent a constituency in England. Put very simply, if new clause 36 is agreed to, it will give the Secretary of State three sorts of power. First, it will give the Health Secretary powers under subsection (4) to, effectively, change the National Health Service Act 2006. Secondly, it will give the Health Secretary powers to set out regulations about how any service, whether public or private, carries out assisted dying services. Thirdly, the Health Secretary will have powers under subsection (1) to commission assisted dying services.”
“Members have questioned other Members’ reasons for tabling amendments—but to suggest, as has been suggested today, that we are scaremongering, when we are actually going through the detail, is something else. I am afraid. This is not me scaremongering; this is me being afraid for women who are anorexic. This is a gendered Bill. There are amendments that I support because I want to strengthen the Bill. I genuinely do not think that the Bill, as it stands, has that strength. I feel disheartened that we are talking about what is going to happen on Third Reading and potential votes, when we should be concentrating on the amendments on the selection list. I oppose the new clauses tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley, which would replace clause 32. As my hon.”
“Absolutely. As a former commissioner, I am very familiar with commissioning; I commissioned millions of pounds’ worth of services across Bradford when I was in the NHS. The difference is that that was under Government Bills that had pre-consultation, impact assessments and a model that was debated. None of that has happened with this Bill. I agree that in an ideal world the process set out in new clauses 36 and 37 would be the right one, but without an impact assessment and a consultation, I am afraid that I have been left really disheartened. I am disheartened about something else, too. I thank all Committee members, regardless of the points that they have or have not made, for the way in which the debate has been conducted, both before and during our sittings. On a few occasions, hon.”
“Serco was eventually fined £23 million for fraud and false accounting; G4S was fined £44 million for the same scandal, but that only happened in 2020, seven years after its fraud was first revealed. These two companies committed fraud against the taxpayer worth tens of millions of pounds.”
“They will need to hire doctors and other specialist staff. They will need the facilities to transport and store lethal drugs. We are almost certainly going to see the same old big four outsourcing companies bidding for these contracts. That would be a major problem, because the big four have a terrible record. I apologise for not being able to give a complete list of the scandals in which these four firms have been involved while running Government contracts—after all, time is limited—but it is worth mentioning a few. In 2013, both Serco and G4S were found to have spent years keeping inaccurate records on how they tagged and monitored dangerous criminals. As a result, they had overcharged the Government by tens of millions of pounds.”
“Take a specialist activity like running immigration processing. There is no existing market. That means there are few plausible bidders outside of a handful of huge multinational outsourcing firms.” It means, as Freedman notes, that the UK’s outsourcing market is dominated by the big four: Serco, Capita, Atos and G4S. There must be a very good chance that these companies will end up bidding for assisted dying services. Freedman gives immigration processing as an example of a complex service in which there are not going to be a lot of companies making good, competitive bids. Assisted dying is even more complex than immigration processing, and it is even more important to get it right. To bid for assisted dying services, companies will need experience in securing complex Government contracts. They will need very good legal advice.”
“First, there need to be many firms or public organisations competing to offer a service. Secondly, the regulator needs to be able to measure clearly whether the firms have delivered the service to a good standard. Finally, “government needs to be able to hand over most of the risk of failure—if the taxpayer is still on the hook for picking the costs if things go wrong then the premium paid to private firms is not justified.” There are fields in which Government contracts do meet those criteria and outsourcing works very well—cleaning services, for example. There are some diagnostic or therapeutic services in the NHS for which private firms can make a genuinely competitive offer. A lot of the time, however, that does not happen: “For more complex services, though, often none of these criteria apply.”
“Now, free at point of use doesn’t preclude the use of independent contractors to deliver the service. So, yeah, we’re comfortable with that.” Unfortunately, we have seen major failings in the way private firms handle important contracts given to them by the Government. Those failings have happened under all three major parties in England and Wales. I want to quote from an excellent book by Sam Freedman, “Failed State”, which is not about some foreign country but about our own. I should say that Sam Freedman was a special adviser to Michael Gove under the Conservative Government, so he is not someone on the far left. Chapter 3 of the book, which concerns outsourcing, is entitled “Contract Killing”. It says that outsourcing contracts can work well if three conditions are met.”
“However, it is not only private sector healthcare firms that are likely to bid for any future assisted dying contract. There are other firms with a good chance of winning those contracts that we should be very concerned about. The Minister for Care has made it clear that the Government are considering using private firms for assisted dying. He gave an important interview on assisted dying to PoliticsHome , which was published on 11 March. He said that my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley “has said that she wants this service to be an integral part of the NHS, meaning free at the point of use. Certainly the advice that we as ministers have given her is we’ve clearly understood that that is her wish, and that is a wish that can be delivered and carried out.”
“Giving the Health Secretary the power to commission private firms to work as contractors to provide assisted dying would perhaps solve that problem, with skilled healthcare professionals working in the private sector. In an interview with The Guardian on 10 January, the Health Secretary said: “Where there is spare capacity in the independent sector we will use it. We have agreed that we will work with them, and they will work with us to cut NHS waiting times…At the same time the independent sector has to pull its weight. It’s got to be genuinely additional capacity. I’m entirely pragmatic about this”. I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend that where there is genuine capacity in the private sector to help the NHS to complete its tasks, we should of course use that capacity.”
“For example, the Royal College of General Practitioners said in its written evidence TIAB 108 that it “does not believe that, if assisted dying is legalised, the process should be integrated into existing care pathways as part of the standard care and treatment they provide i.e. assisted dying should not be deemed core GP work…As such, we consider that if assisted dying is legalised the Bill should make provision to establish a separate Assisted Dying service. This may help to ensure that assisted dying was not a core part of GP work and that any doctor who did not want to be involved would not be forced to do so.” There is a problem here.”
“Finally, we come to what I think is the most important part of new clause 36: the powers in subsection (1) to commission assisted dying services. How the Secretary of State uses those powers will be crucial to the transparency of the system and to the impact of assisted dying on the NHS. We do not know whether the Health Secretary will contract private firms to provide services to the NHS or whether all assisted dying will be provided under the NHS. We do know, however, that many parts of the medical profession are strongly alarmed by the idea that the NHS would provide assisted dying.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris, for what might be the last time on this Bill Committee. When we adjourned this morning, I was speaking to new clauses 36 and 37. To bring us up to speed, I will repeat my last paragraph. If the interpretation that I suggested this morning is correct, surely we could have tighter wording. For example, the new clause could say that if the Secretary of State decides to allow private firms to provide assisted dying to paying customers, the Secretary of State must make regulations to govern that. I would welcome clarification from my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley on whether she would be minded to accept such an amendment, given that she accepted a change from “may” to “must” in previous amendments.”
“I will get back to the point, Mrs Harris. Serco and G4S carried on getting huge public contracts because the Government found it too hard to replace them. Assisted dying would also be a specialised service.”
“Some of them do, or they deliver parts of healthcare. Any company can bid or design a service to recruit doctors, as I said earlier. That is the reason I mention these companies. Big companies already do provide some services to our NHS, albeit that they may be in different areas at the moment.”
“Would companies be paid a fee for each stage of the assisted dying process that they have provided: one fee for providing the first assessment by a doctor, another for a second assessment and so on, up until the final fee for helping the patient take the lethal drugs? As I said this morning, we do not know what the proposal for the structure is. That is why it is important that we explore and understand the risks of every structure. There are Government services that we can safely outsource. Assessing whether people are fit to end their life is not one of them, and neither is helping people to take lethal drugs. These clauses will enable future Governments to open up lucrative contracts for assisted dying that will almost certainly be won by companies that have often been incompetent and have potentially been dishonest.”
“I am happy to, Mrs Harris. We should be determined not to see big outsourcing companies bidding for assisted dying contracts and then potentially misusing them the way in which they have misused other public services. That is not because I am opposed to firms operating in a free market or making money when they do their job well; it is because the way we run outsourced Government contracts in this country often has nothing to do with the free market and nothing to do with companies working well. Finally, we need to ask hard questions about how the contracts for assisted dying would be structured.”
“When it comes to NHS providers, or any service providers, and contracting or outsourcing, we have legislation in this place for whistleblowing. I raised the subject with the Health Secretary in relation to my local trust only today. With the best will in the world, mistakes happen. We legislated to protect whistleblowers, and that ties in directly to these risks. We must do everything we can to mitigate such risks in the Bill.”
“They will have other abilities but they will not look at this through the lens that a senior doctor would. Secondly, it cannot be good governance that the only person who must see the data is the commissioner—the official who runs the assisted dying system and who appoints all the panel members.”
“Amendment 539 retains that weakness, while adding what I view as a new problem. The new weakness is that the amendment removes the requirement for doctors to notify the CMO of the events. Instead, it specifies that they should notify the voluntary assisted dying commissioner. By all means let us have doctors reporting these events to the commissioner, but they should still be required to report the events to the chief medical officers too. There are at least two good reasons for that. First, the chief medical officers are extremely experienced, senior doctors. They and their staff have the ability to look at this kind of data from a medical and especially a public health perspective. The VAD commissioner will come from a legal, not medical background.”
“I rise to speak in support of amendments 172 and 173, tabled by the hon. Member for Reigate, and against amendment 539, moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley. Clause 33 currently provides that the Health Secretary “may” bring forward regulations to require a doctor to report any notifiable event to the chief medical officer. That would be either the CMO for England or the CMO for Wales, according to where the assisted death takes place. The clause lists those notifiable events, such as the first declaration, the two statements by the doctors, including when they refuse to make such a statement, and the final statement that follows the person’s death. The weakness in the clause as originally written is its use of the word “may”. It should not be optional for the Secretary of State to make such regulations.”
“Finally, on such an important matter, Parliament should be required to vote to accept such regulations, as that will increase the scrutiny from both this House and the other place. I appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley drew my attention to her amendment, which says the commissioner must consult the chief medical officer. However, it does not specify whether the consultation should include data or if it is the beginning of the process; those things are not stated on the face of the Bill. That leaves it open to interpretation, which is why I support the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Reigate. I thank her for tabling those two very sensible amendments and I urge hon. Members to vote for them. From my perspective, amendment 539 weakens the Bill and we should vote against it.”
“As things stand, regulations brought forward under the clause would be subject to the negative procedure, which, as all hon. Members know, considerably reduces the amount of parliamentary scrutiny they receive. Amendment 173 would make regulations under the clause subject to the affirmative procedure. I honestly try to see the arguments for and against each amendment, but I have real difficulty in seeing what the arguments against these two might be. Clearly, notifiable events are important information that must be collected nationally for a transparent assisted dying system. Equally, they need to be governed by regulations so that all doctors participating in the scheme have a clear picture of their responsibilities.”
“I will come on to that point. As I have said previously, this Bill will not just create a VAD commissioner, but give them the power to assess their own work. That means it is much less likely they will critically assess the data for any signs of a major problem. We all suffer from unconscious bias, even the very senior legal officials who will be eligible to become VAD commissioners. If the data were sent to the chief medical officers as well as the commissioner, that would mean two sets of officials with different perspectives and fields of expertise looking for problems. We would have a much better chance of locating problems earlier that way. Amendment 172 would change the clause so that the Health Secretary must bring forward such regulations.”
“Asking people to mark their own homework is a really bad way to check that any system is working properly. It is not how we inspect and report on schools; Ofsted has that job, not headteachers or local councils. It is not how we regulate banks, which are overseen by independent authorities.”
“The chief medical officers for England and Wales are senior doctors who advice Governments on all medical matters; of course they should be centrally involved in seeing whether the system works and whether there are any problems. The second argument—that the commissioner’s office will become assisted dying subject matter experts—does not stand up either. It is true that the commissioner and the officials they recruit will come to know a great deal about the system they set up, but the very fact that they will set up and run the system means they should not take the lead on monitoring, investigating and reporting. That would mean that the commissioner and their staff would be the first people who decide whether they are doing a good job.”
“The second argument in favour is that the amendments to the Bill create a voluntary assisted dying commissioner, and that person and their officials will build up expertise in that field, so it could be argued that the commissioner would be the best person to lead monitoring, investigation and reporting. Unfortunately I do not think those arguments hold water. On the first, it is true that CMOs have a great deal to do, but if we pass the Bill, it will be one of the biggest changes made to the duties of doctors in this country. For the first time, they will be able to help patients to take lethal drugs solely in order to bring about their death.”
“It provides for the monitoring, investigation and reporting functions under clause 34 to be carried out by the voluntary assisted dying commissioner instead of the chief medical officers for England and Wales. I can think of two possible arguments in support of it. I do not know whether either was behind my hon. Friend’s decision to table the amendment, but they are certainly the best to my mind. The first argument in favour is that the chief medical officers for England and Wales already have a great many demands on their time. Members might say that we should not risk overloading them and should instead give another official the responsibility of looking at how assisted dying systems work.”
“I rise to speak to amendment 382. My hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley may argue that some of my criticisms of the amendment relate in particular to two other amendments she has tabled: amendments 455 and 456. Indeed, I took an intervention on the matter earlier. I have read those amendments and they do not answer my concerns about amendment 382. They were grouped with amendment 382 until this morning, when the grouping was changed, so I will address them in my next speech. This is a good moment to pay tribute to the Committee Clerks for their extremely hard work. I thank them for the way they have coped with the complex groupings and huge numbers of amendments that are unprecedented for a private Member’s Bill in this century. My hon. Friend’s explanatory statement gives a clear explanation about what amendment 382 does.”
“Amendment 382 significantly weakens the version of the Bill that was presented to the House on Second Reading. We are being asked to let the commissioner report on their own work. That makes it much less likely that we would be able to spot any problems with the assisted dying system at an early stage. I therefore urge Members to vote against the amendment.”
“The executives who ran the Post Office and the engineers at Fujitsu who had set up and then run the Horizon system. What did those experts say for about 15 years? That there were no serious problems with Horizon, that the sub-postmasters and mistresses who said otherwise were lying and that all their convictions were safe. We know how that turned out. That surely leads us to a clear lesson: we cannot ask powerful people who have created and are in charge of a system—in this case, the assisted dying system—to be the ones who report on it. I am not saying that we would see a deliberate cover-up, as there seems to have been in the Post Office scandal. What I am saying is that we all have unconscious biases and all of us are biased to think that the work we do is good and that there are no serious problems with it.”
“That would at least be an improvement on allowing the assisted dying commissioner to say, “There’s nothing to see here.” In my view, the best choice would be to retain the system that the Bill started out with and keep the chief medical officers as the people with the main responsibility for oversight. Members disagreed with my comparison of assisted dying with the scandal of what happened to the sub-postmasters and mistresses, but we have to think about what we have learned about the causes of that scandal. Under the law, Ministers had responsibility for the Post Office. Even though it was an arm’s length responsibility, they still had it. When complaints about the Horizon IT system, and then complaints about miscarriages of justice, started to come through to MPs, Ministers asked the experts in the field. Who were those experts?”
“When we regulate an important system in this country, we should not allow the people who run it to be the only people to tell us whether it is working as it should. Although we respect the highly skilled people who run our schools and police our streets, we have independent people whose job it is to check whether there are any major issues. The assisted dying system created by the Bill is both complicated and, potentially, very dangerous. If the system gets things wrong, it will mean that people will be given lethal drugs who should not have had them. That is why I would strongly support keeping the chief medical officers as the people who run monitoring, investigating and reporting. Perhaps there could be a dual system in which both the CMOs and the VAD commissioner have some kind of role.”
“As far as I have seen, no regulatory system has been proposed in regard to the Bill. I am happy to be corrected. Yes, in other instances we have regulators, but in this instance no regulator is specified. That is why I will come back to my argument about the amendment, but I value my hon. Friend’s intervention. This is not how we regulate banks, which are overseen by independent authorities. We have seen what happens when there is light-touch regulation. Banks told us all that they were doing a great job until it turned out that they were not. There is an Independent Police Complaints Commission—I could go on, as the list is very long, but I hope we can all agree on the principle.”