Matt Warman

By Matt Warman Boston & Skegness MP

At Boston’s Pilgrim Hospital last week, the Bishop of Grantham unveiled an organ donation tree, marking the gift given by all those who have donated their organs so that others might live more fulfilling lives. It is, by any definition, a gift that goes beyond anything that money can buy. And it’s a gift that millions need and few are prepared to give.

The tree at Pilgrim is, of course, a commemoration but also a symbolic advert for more people to get behind the organ donation initiative. For decades, it’s been an opt-in measure: those who, for whatever reason, have signed up to donate some or all of their useful organs on their death have done amazing things, but the system has been hampered simply by the small numbers of people who are ever asked, and the consequently even smaller number that say yes.

This week in Westminster, the Government will, however, back a literally life-changing proposal for hundreds of thousands of people in the UK, which I sincerely hope all parties will back. Rather than opt-in, the system will be flipped to opt-out.

Anyone who feels they would rather not donate a specific or all their organs will be able to retain just as much control as now, but the assumption will be that people are willing to aid medical science to help others.

Not everyone, of course, will be affected, but the overall impact will be enormous. As has already been seen in Wales, it’s a shift that results in radically different lives for huge numbers.

Why are levels of organ donation too low in the first place? The answer is largely down to both logistics and inertia: people aren’t asked often enough, and there is no easy way to scale up the process of asking. Adverts, over many decades, have had limited effect.

This is not for a second to downplay the significance of the decision being made: to donate an organ will remain a choice and it will never happen if a potential donor has said they don’t want to.

These proposals strike, for me, the right balance: they ensure that people who care passionately about not donating an organ can still make sure they never do, but it also says that those who can’t be bothered to take the time out to fill in a very simply form are probably not passionate about avoiding something which, of course, will only have any impact on them after their own death.

That means religious communities, for instance, who often have strongly held views on such matters, will easily be able to use their own networks to opt out large numbers of people – but it also means that good on a huge scale will be done with relatively little change.

Indeed, a challenge will be to make sure the NHS is prepared to tackle with the hoped-for surge in organs now available to help save lives. That – for once – would be a nice problem to have.

Matt Warman is the Conservative MP for the Boston and Skegness constituency.

By Matt Warman Boston & Skegness MP

It’s a peculiarity of elected political life that constituents simultaneously tell me to get on with doing just one thing, and also that government must concentrate on a host of endless issues, from roads to hospitals and from defence to agriculture. The reality, of course, is that a government that did just one thing at a time would never do anything, and Westminster must endlessly look at a multitude of issues.

Nonetheless, this week I freely admit testing the final frontier of that proposition when I spoke in the Space Industry Bill, which seeks to make sure that Britain remains at the forefront of an industry that scarcely yet exists.

Indeed, as I mentioned in the House, in Boston and Skegness, space comes up surprisingly frequently. That is not because there is a lot of it in the open country in which one might build a spaceport, but because, as one might expect, many constituents talk about foreign aid.

The question that always arises is why we give money to certain countries. “They have space programmes,” is the accusation. To have a space programme is used as the definition of a country that is a thriving, great nation – one that doesn’t need any help.

The Space Industry Bill, indeed, is a classic example of government looking confidently to the future: it pays attention in part to potential space tourism, which is already beginning to attract serious investment, but it also looks towards the satellites of the future that will power new industries, and above all it considers that space exploration and use is an industry that has historically generated extraordinary spin offs – not least Teflon – and real economic benefits.

To those who say we can’t afford the NHS, why should we look into space, the answer is that government cannot afford not to look to the industries of the future and the economic growth that they will bring.

So it is vital to address the question of how we should be trying to foster the benefits of a new economy that is wrapped up in new technologies and reap additional benefits on Earth. And it is also vital we don’t do so by allowing space to get clogged up with the debris of decades of research, successful or otherwise.

Extraordinary as it sounds, we must begin to think of ourselves not only as global citizens, but as intergalactic citizens.

In preparing this legislation, government consulted industry and the Science and Technology Select Committee, of which I was a member. They also sought to make sure that we did not simply have a single principle that was so broad that it was almost meaningless — that we would also have principles embodied in legislation that were broad enough to allow industries to grow and flourish and did not constrain them too much.

I, like all members of all parties across the House, supported this Bill – specifically because it does not embody every single regulation in statute; it looks optimistically to the future – because securing that prosperous future goes to the core of what parliament is for.

Matt Warman is the Conservative MP for the Boston and Skegness constituency.