I rise as a member of the Joint Select Committee to strongly support the amendment. I shall not go over the previous legal history, or repeat what I said in Committee, other than to emphasise a particular aspect of the case to which I drew attention then. That case related to an elderly woman in her 90s who was resident in a private care home and was totally self-funded. She had been a resident for some time and had the temerity to air her views on assisted dying, which did not please some of the home’s staff. She did not seek anybody’s help to commit suicide; she just expressed her views. The home’s management gave her four weeks’ notice to leave the home as a result. When her son raised the issue of her rights under the Human Rights Act with legal counsel, the opinion he was given was that she lacked protection under that Act because she was not in receipt of a service from a body providing a function of a public nature as her placement was neither publicly provided nor in a publicly funded home.
As a member of the Joint Select Committee I raised this matter when we were looking at the Bill and, after deliberation, the committee was unanimous in recommending that the Bill should be amended to clarify matters. This is what the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Low, does. It covers all users of a regulated social care service. It is clear that there are differences of legal opinion on this matter when particular cases are raised. I consider that as parliamentarians, it is our duty to put the matter beyond doubt and provide self-funders with the legal certainty that other elderly people may have when they are in receipt of either domiciliary or residential care.
One of the most important new points that has been made on this issue since we debated it before was made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, when he said that courts will notice if we do not take this opportunity to amend and clarify this legislation. That means that we cannot—as one of my children would say—faff around any longer on this issue. We have to make a decision; the amendment makes that decision, and we should all support it. Frankly, the Government should stop the legal equivalent of counting how many angels can be put on the head of a pin and accept the legal certainty that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Low, provides. They should be supporting people who are paying their own way by funding their care, not the reverse. There will be a lot more of them in the future so let us provide that protection now.