Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, that if I found myself on a long flight while 26 weeks pregnant—which I have to say is unlikely—there are few members of the human race that I would rather share the plane with than him. My question is not in relation to the patient him or herself, which is obviously a matter to which noble Lords on all sides of the House have given attention. The problem is that, as I understand it, the amendment is anxious to use the information for the benefit of patients generally, for the practice of medical care and for everything that is in the amendment. I would have thought that of course the rest of the team will know who the patient is, but if you wish to disclose information about a particular case that could be of wider interest to the professions involved, surely anonymity is a protection. We had this over and again in debating the Human Tissue Act, which I am sorry to come back to again. It is the question of how far anonymising data would be a protection. If one is going to provide information, even to the extent of writing an article for a medical journal, you would not dream of mentioning the patient’s name or anything else about him or her, because it would be anonymised. At the same time, there might be valuable information that should be available to the professions. The puzzled look on the face of the noble Lord, Lord Winston, suggests that I am barking up a very wrong tree; in which case I will sit down.