Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they will place the correspondence they have had with the Welsh Government regarding the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in the Library of the House.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government does not intend to place the requested advice or correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill into the Library of the House.
Government advice and correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is in line with Government policy to ensure coherence of the statute book, and to help to ensure the bill is workable, whilst remaining neutral on the matter of assisted dying. In relation to legislative consent motions, requesting legislative consent motions from Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland is a matter for the sponsor. The Government continues to offer technical advice to ensure the devolution settlement is respected.
The Department recognises the importance of promoting openness and transparency in Government. However, it is also in the public interest that the Government can engage confidentially with the sponsors of the bill, so that the advice the Department provides in relation to the operability and soundness of the bill can be free and frank, both in relation to this bill and any future private member’s bill where the Government engages closely with the sponsor.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 15 October (HL10682), whether they will publish the notes of the meetings with the promoters of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and the actions taken as a result of those meetings in the Library of the House.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government does not intend to place the requested advice or correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill into the Library of the House.
Government advice and correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is in line with Government policy to ensure coherence of the statute book, and to help to ensure the bill is workable, whilst remaining neutral on the matter of assisted dying. In relation to legislative consent motions, requesting legislative consent motions from Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland is a matter for the sponsor. The Government continues to offer technical advice to ensure the devolution settlement is respected.
The Department recognises the importance of promoting openness and transparency in Government. However, it is also in the public interest that the Government can engage confidentially with the sponsors of the bill, so that the advice the Department provides in relation to the operability and soundness of the bill can be free and frank, both in relation to this bill and any future private member’s bill where the Government engages closely with the sponsor.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they have requested a Legislative Consent Motion for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill from (1) the Senedd, (2) the Northern Ireland Assembly, and (3) the Scottish Parliament; and if so, whether they will lay those letters of request in the Library of the House.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government does not intend to place the requested advice or correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill into the Library of the House.
Government advice and correspondence related to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is in line with Government policy to ensure coherence of the statute book, and to help to ensure the bill is workable, whilst remaining neutral on the matter of assisted dying. In relation to legislative consent motions, requesting legislative consent motions from Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland is a matter for the sponsor. The Government continues to offer technical advice to ensure the devolution settlement is respected.
The Department recognises the importance of promoting openness and transparency in Government. However, it is also in the public interest that the Government can engage confidentially with the sponsors of the bill, so that the advice the Department provides in relation to the operability and soundness of the bill can be free and frank, both in relation to this bill and any future private member’s bill where the Government engages closely with the sponsor.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 30 October (HL10679), other than the bill team, how many officials are working in (1) the Department of Health and Social Care, (2) NHS England, on evaluating or devising implementation of the policy set out in the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government is neutral on the principle of assisted dying and whether the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill becomes law.
Currently there is no implementation team. Bill officials are currently working to fulfil the Government’s duty to the statue book, providing technical drafting support and technical workability advice on clauses. Should the bill gain Royal Assent, some of this work could be deployed to inform an implementation programme.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 25 September (HL10725), how many civil servants were (1) working on compiling the abortion statistics for England and Wales from 2023 onwards, and (2) how many additional civil servants have been working on these statistics as a result of the delay in publication.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
A range of people working in different roles, civil service grades, and professions work on compiling the abortion statistics for England and Wales. This includes analysts, data entry specialists, policy professionals, and publications and communications specialists, whose contributions towards the abortion statistics publication make up varying degrees of their core role. For this reason, it is not possible to fully quantify the number of individuals compiling the abortion statistics. However, in the two main teams, the Department’s abortion statistics and abortion data entry teams, the combined number of staff, which represent the number of individuals rather than the number of full-time equivalent staff, below Senior Civil Servant grade was nine on 2 January 2023 and 10 on 17 October 2025.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they plan to publish abortion statistics for England and Wales for 2023 by the end of this year.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The publication date for abortion statistics for England and Wales for 2023 has not been confirmed. This is because of delays, due to several operational issues. These include issues associated with moving to a new data processing system and an increase in the number of paper abortion notification forms to process.
Publication of the 2023 data is provisionally planned for winter 2025/26. We will announce the date for publication in due course.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many (1) appointments, (2) tests and (3) operations were delivered by independent providers for NHS patients in (a) 2022–23 and (b) 2023–24.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Independent sector providers have a role to play in supporting the National Health Service as trusted partners to recover elective services by using additional capacity to tackle the backlog whilst delivering value for money.
Independent sector providers delivered 3,265,305 outpatient appointments in 2022/23 and 4,156,770 outpatient appointments in 2023/24, including first appointment and follow-up.
They delivered 1,523,195 tests in 2022/23 and 1,876,989 in 2023/24. This includes only the 15 key diagnostic tests and excludes activity subcontracted from NHS trusts where responsibility for the pathway remains with the trust.
There were 761,420 inpatient admissions in independent sector providers in 2022/23 and 970,865 inpatient admissions in 2023/24. This includes ordinary electives and day case electives.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many officials (1) in total, and (2) in number of full-time equivalent staff, have been involved in supporting the promoters of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in the Department of Health and Social Care since November 2020.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The number of full-time equivalent staff working on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has fluctuated since January 2025; there was not a team working on this bill prior to this, and any work on assisted dying was delivered through existing policy teams. The primary function of the team now in place is to fulfil the Government’s duty to the statute book, with regards to the legal and technical coherence of the bill. This includes providing technical drafting support and advising on workability of the legislation, as well as supporting Ministers to fulfil their duties to Parliament, such as responding to questions and correspondence and Parliamentary debates and committee hearing. Matters of policy have remained solely for the Sponsoring Members, Kim Leadbeater MP in the House of Commons and Lord Falconer in the House of Lords, to determine.
As of 1 September 2025, there were 11.8 full-time equivalent (FTE) officials in the Department of Health and Social Care Bill Team, at its largest the Bill Team was 16.8 FTEs. Where required, contributions on specific issues may have been sought from other teams, however the FTE cannot be accurately quantified for these issues.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many meetings ministers in the Department of Health and Social Care have had with promoters of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill since November 2020.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
Ministers in the Department have had 15 meetings with the sponsors of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, namely the Hon. Member Kim Leadbeater and Lord Falconer of Thoroton.
Asked by: Baroness Coffey (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many GP practices returned more than 1000 HSA4 forms which record an abortion by medicine administered at home in (1) 2023, and (2) 2024.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department collects information on abortions via the HSA4 abortion notification form. The HSA4 form does not capture information on whether the form was returned by a general practice.
The HSA4 form does capture information on the hospital or clinic where the termination took place, and whether any medicine was administered at the patient’s usual place of residence. However, the publication of the Abortion Statistics for England and Wales from 2023 onwards has been delayed due to several operational issues. These include issues associated with moving to a new data processing system and an increase in the number of paper abortion notification forms to process. We will announce the dates of the publication of the data for 2023, and later 2024, in due course.