My Lords, I am so grateful to noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It has been quite short, but it is very important. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said in the previous debate on the agency, she has been involved with this Bill in a way that she did not anticipate. She has been such a stalwart, coming to my rescue on occasions, and supporting so much of what has been in the Bill from other sources. I thank her for all of that. The noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, made a powerful speech about the individuals he has met. We know Susan Morgan well; we have worked with Janet and Emma and many others who have led their own organisations. We think of patient groups as being a few people who got together—when we did not have lockdown—to have coffee and just discuss life generally. That is not the case.
One of the groups I know has 8,500 members—from all over the world, in fact. Other groups have an equal number of members, or numbers of that order. So these are important organisations. They know what it is to have real research. They come up with not just experiences; they beaver away at all our institutions, they look at what they are producing and they challenge. They are so valuable. In the way they work, when they are people who are in considerable pain—very often, they have complicated and difficult lives, having to deal with constant pain—they are thinking of others all the time. That really is so uplifting.
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I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, so much for, again, a very interesting debate and for talking about the powerful signal that the Government should have
got from the debate. I was very interested in his full and comprehensive points on the agency. Eventually, the two will be linked, I think, but at the moment, here and now, we should be ameliorating the terrible difficulties that these damaged people must endure.
I say this to my noble friend Lord Bethell: this Bill has actually been quite extraordinary, in a way. I congratulate him on the way in which he has dealt with it and on the number of amendments that he has put forward. I know that they often need a lot of negotiating, not only with the department but beyond it as well. I thank him for that, for listening to us, for his patience, for his consideration, for his views and for the work that he has to carry out, which we do not always see. He is also right to mention coronavirus. Many times, I have put the House of Lords on on the television and seen the noble Lord again at the Dispatch Box. It is not just about his compassion; it is about the resilience that he has had to have to carry out his duty. I thank him very much for that.
Finally, I would like to hear some dates. I have run a company. I know what it is like when you have to deliver. You have to deliver; otherwise, you go out of business. You have serious competition—you have to keep your eye on them—but you absolutely must meet deadlines. A bit of that rigour in government would be very welcome. There are tremendous tragedies that have to be dealt with, of course. There are huge concerns, especially with the virus. I understand that. I accept that having to make decisions on all sorts of very difficult issues takes a huge amount of energy and thought. However, as I said earlier, in this case, these people have been suffering for decades. It is time that they got justice. A bit of justice in terms of ameliorating the terrible suffering that they endure through some finance would be terribly important, especially for us as a Government to show that we are not only resilient but compassionate. It is time that we did that.
I thank noble Lords for this debate and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.