Schedule 1 - Scheduled purposes
Human Tissue Bill
4:00 pm
Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I do not think that the provision would be weaker, because the whole structure of the codes of practice is permissive, in the sense that they allow the Human Tissue Authority to determine what the practice should be. The codes of practice will state that, under some circumstances, the use of residual tissue will require consent, so it would not necessarily follow that the codes of practice would therefore require the approval of a research ethics committee, although that would probably happen under those circumstances as well.
There is a structure here. There is a point of principle here—are we committed to explicit consent as a basis for the use of residual tissues arising from
treatment? The research community is saying that that is a very burdensome requirement. We have to weigh up whether the demands of consent from living persons following treatment are such that we are not willing to consider that there may be a place for residual tissue—with the consent of research ethics committees—being treated as an exception to that principle. It is a question that we need to consider. I am not saying that we should necessarily reach that conclusion, but we should show the research community that we have considered it. I freely confess that there may be technical problems with the amendments, but the issue needs to be thought about—whether residual tissues arising from treatment, particularly if they are small amounts and directly consequent upon that treatment, should be, necessarily, the subject of explicit consent.
That is the first question that I do not want us to lose sight of, but there are others, and amendments Nos. 87 and 88 are not confined to that question. I ask the Committee to think about those two amendments separately. We discussed earlier, on the first group of amendments, the extent to which consent should be taken for specific, scheduled purposes. Amendment No. 87 would introduce a further standard to be laid down in the codes of practice by the Human Tissue Authority, to the effect that provision to secure consent
''should indicate for which scheduled purposes consent has been obtained.''
That is less rigid than putting the structure into the Bill, but clearly directs the Human Tissue Authority towards avoiding generic consent for a range of purposes without spelling out which purposes are intended.
Amendments Nos. 87 and 88 also add a further question—it is merely a question. Can consent for the purpose of transplantation be given by means of ''an enduring consent''? An enduring consent is defined under amendment No. 88 as
''a consent given by the person concerned which is obtained prior to any treatment and which is not specific to the circumstances of any diagnosis or course of treatment of that person while he is alive, or to the circumstances of his death.''
Can we be assured that, if explicit consent is required, consent for the purposes of transplantation will not be dependent on any of the circumstances giving rise to the person's death or any of the treatments or diagnoses that he might have received before his death? Will consent at an early stage, unrelated to subsequent events, be regarded as consent that carries through to the scheduled purpose being implemented after death?