 Teimlo i'r ysgolwch i Ynys Gweithio Aelodau Cymdeithasol ym Llywodraeth Cymru. Mae gynnydd eich bod yn ymwyaf i'r gweithio mewn amser yn ymddangos gyda'r gweithio oesol. Yn Gweithio Cymdeithasol, mae'r hyn yn ysgolwch ar gyfer y Llawg Pwyllgor Fwyllgor Cymru, mae'r cyflwytoedd ym Llywodraeth Cymdeithasol ym Llywodraeth Cymdeithasol yn ymwyaf i'r cyfnod. The first two, which preceded our consultation paper, have been hugely important for us in formulating the provisional views that we've put forward in that paper, and it's clear from the programme for this one that it's going to be equally significant as we take forward our work. So, as Jens mentioned earlier this month, us, together with our colleagues at the Scottish Law Commission, published a joint consultation paper, Building Families through Surrogacy a New Law. As we put our consultation paper together, we had some particular aims in mind. The first is that surrogacy has to work best for those who are most closely affected by it. So the children born through surrogacy whose interests must be paramount, women who become surrogates and intended parents. Secondly, the law should take us at the starting point that surrogacy is a legitimate and accepted way of building a family. And then thirdly, we want to create a legal environment that encourages intended parents in the UK to look to the UK as the best place to have their surrogacy arrangement. But we acknowledge that international surrogacy agreements will continue and we don't assume that all domestic arrangements are good and all international arrangements are bad. The picture is much more complex than that. And as international surrogacy will continue, we think the law should support the interests of children who are born through those international surrogacy arrangements. Now our consultation paper is a comprehensive review of the law and I'm just going to highlight some key aspects of it. And I want to stress at the outset that it is a consultation paper and consultation lies at the heart of how we as law commissions work. We have put forward in our paper a number of provisional proposals for reform where the work we've done up until this point and the meetings we've had with a number of key stakeholders have persuaded us to reach an initial conclusion. We've asked open questions when we don't feel an initial view is yet there. But everything we have put forward is subject to consultation and our final recommendations for reform will be based on the consultation responses we have. So our main purpose in being here this next couple of days is to hear your views, to start a conversation which we hope will encourage you to put in a formal response to our consultation paper. So the first aspect of our work I will talk about is our proposal for the creation of a new pathway to legal parenthood. A pathway under which the intended parents will be the parents of the child from birth unless within a short defined period the surrogate objects. Our new pathway will sit alongside the current post birth parental order regime that will continue to apply in some surrogacy arrangements, particularly international ones. I then explain how we've approached the key question of what payments intended parents should be able to make to the woman who becomes their surrogate. And then outline our approach to international surrogacy arrangements and our proposal for the creation of a national register of surrogacy arrangements. But before turning to the first of those topics I want to draw together some of our proposals and explain how we see surrogacy is operating in the UK under a reformed law. One of the things we've been struck by in the work we've done so far is the keenness to ensure that surrogacy in the UK does not become a commercial arrangement. We agree with that to the extent that under our proposals surrogacy organisations will remain non-profit making bodies and surrogacy agreements would not become enforceable contracts. On the topic of payments we have a wide ranging discussion and that includes asking the question whether a woman should be able to be paid for the gestational services that she provides as surrogate. In looking at the question of payments we haven't found the classifications of arrangements as commercial or altruistic to be a useful one. We find that that classification suggests a bright line that simply doesn't exist even under the current law and practice. So with that in mind I'll turn first of all to our new pathway to parenthood and I'll say a few things first about what arrangements will be eligible under the new pathway. We hope that most domestic arrangements will be brought within the new pathway. That includes traditional as well as gestational arrangements. But international agreements will not. That's because our new pathway contains a number of safeguards within it that it wouldn't be possible or feasible to ensure a met in international agreements. For arrangements under the new pathway we've also provisionally proposed that in cases of medical necessity it should not be a requirement that one of the intended parents has a genetic link to the child. That proposal reflects a view that has been made strongly to us in our pre-consultation discussions that in surrogacy arrangements the shared intentions of the intended parents and surrogate can be more important than the genetic relationship with the child. We ask whether other domestic arrangements that don't fall within the new pathway should also be able to carry on without a genetic link in cases of medical necessity. But we have taken the view that for international arrangements the requirement of a genetic link should retain. We think there would be an unacceptable risk of child trafficking if it was removed in the international context. So those were a few points on eligibility for our new pathway. Under the pathway the intended parents journey to becoming the parents of the child begins prior to the child being conceived. So as it happens at the moment the intended parents and surrogate would meet, organisations where the licensed clinics or surrogacy organisations that want to help provide matching or facilitation arrangements to enable intended parents and surrogates to meet up would need to be regulator to provide those services and that regulation would be through the HFEA that the human fertilisation and embryology authority. Once they have met there would be criminal record and medical checks carried out on the surrogate intended parents and the surrogate spouse or civil partner. Now that is essentially formalising what often happens in cases in any event. There would also be a requirement that the intended parents and surrogate obtain implications counselling. When they are ready to enter into a surrogacy arrangement they would enter into a formal agreement after obtaining independent legal advice. The pregnancy and childbirth would then happen as happens at the moment. But when the child is born for the moment of birth the intended parents would be recognised as the legal parent of the child. Now we propose as a safeguard that the surrogate should then have a right to object to the intended parents being legal parents which would have to be exercised in a short period of time before the registration of the birth of the child. If she exercises that right to object which we think would only be in very rare cases then the surrogate would become the legal mother of the child and the intended parents could then make an application to court for parental order as happens under the current regime. Now we think that right to object provides an important safeguard and is required to both respect the rights of surrogates and to respect requirements of international law. In putting forward this new pathway to provisional proposal we believe that we have proposals that accord with what surrogates and intended parents all wish to happen under UK law. We have in particular been persuaded by the views of women we've met who have been surrogates who have said to us that they don't agree with being recognised as a mother of the child under law because that's not how they see their role. We think it's important that the law respects and reflects the autonomous decision made by a woman who becomes a surrogate and that the focus of the law should be on ensuring that the decision to become a surrogate is a fully informed one and so we're pushing back that regulation to the preconception stage. But we would not put forward this proposal unless we were convinced that it was also in the best interest of the child born through a surrogacy arrangement and we think the best interest of the child are served by the law reflecting the reality of his or her parentage at the beginning from birth. Now as I said the new pathway will sit alongside the parental order route that will remain for some agreement so I'm not really going to talk to this slide but it summarises the different features of the new pathway and the parental order route particularly at the time at which the intended parents are recognised as the legal parents of the child. So I'll turn next to the issue of payments that the intended parent should be able to make to the surrogate. This has proved unsurprisingly to be one of the most contentious issues in the discussions that we've had so far and we've heard views from people across the spectrum as to what payment should be permitted. At the moment UK law says that the surrogate can be paid only her expenses reasonably incurred but there's a recognised lack of clarity around what expenses covers. We've taken the view that it's simply to open ends of the term it means different things to different people and so rather than approaching the topic by trying to clarify what expenses means we've taken a step back and we've identified a number of different categories of payments that the law could permit and we asked for views both on whether those categories should be permitted under UK law and what payments would fall within each of those categories. So I'm just going to outline them without saying much about their content. So we begin with the narrowest category of essential costs relating to a pregnancy. So costs that would do no more than ensure that the surrogate is not left financially worse off as a result of being the surrogate. We then ask about additional costs incurred through the surrogacy. Now by calling these additional we don't suggest that they are less important to the surrogate but it's an acknowledgement that there are some costs that do not need to be incurred however useful and beneficial they are. We then identify a category of costs that arise specifically because the pregnancy is for the purposes of the surrogacy arrangement. So costs that would not be incurred where a couple are having their own child together who they will raise. Now for those three categories we ask an overriding question as to whether money paid under those categories could be by an allowance or should only be payable against receipts. We then look at lost earnings. We look at particular issues that arise over the impact of payments to the surrogate on entitlement to social security benefits under UK law. We then have categories for compensation for pain inconvenience, medical complications and death. We discuss gifts that the intended parents make to the surrogate. And then finally we ask if the intended parents should be able to pay the payer woman for being their surrogate. And by this we mean specifically pay her for the gestational services that she provides. Importantly we make clear that any such payments could not be dependent on the surrogate giving birth to a live child or on agreeing that the intended parents should then raise that child. We ask whether if these parents, if these payments are permitted, whether they should be open to negotiation between the parties or they could be capped at a fee set by the regulator. So that's the approach we have taken to the issue of payments. Moving then to international surrogacy arrangements. These arrangements of course raise particular concerns because the absence of international standards means that the measures in place to protect women and children involved in surrogacy in different countries varies to such a significant extent. We're all aware of the significant concerns of exploitation that have arisen in some jurisdictions. As I said at the beginning, we hope that bringing clarity and certainty to UK law will remove some of the incentives that intended parents have to enter international arrangements, but we acknowledge that international agreements are going to continue. Now, intended parents who have used international surrogacy are often expressed their disappointment that legal parentage that's granted to them in the country in which their child is born is not recognised in the UK. So that even if they arrive in the UK with a birth certificate in their name, they still have to make a parental order application. We've taken the view that the concerns of exploitation in international surrogacy agreements and the inability of UK law to impose effective safeguards on women in other countries who become surrogates for UK parents dictate against the blanket recognition of legal parenthood granted overseas. But what we suggest is that the Secretary of State should have a power to recognise legal parenthood that's granted in other countries and that that power is one that should only be exercised where the Secretary of State is satisfied that the protection provided to women and children in that country are of an equivalent level to UK law. Beyond that, our focus in international agreements is on considering the operation of nationality and immigration laws and looking at how they might be improved so that parents who have a child overseas can more quickly bring the child back into the UK. We've heard of instances where intendor parents have had to spend several months in another country where their child has been born and we don't think it's in the best interest of the child for that to be happening where the parents often don't speak the language, have no support network and have no access to medical care if they're concerned about the health of the child. So, finally, I'll say a few words about our proposal for a national register of surrogacy arrangements. One of the issues we've been concerned with in drawing up our proposals is to ensure that children born through surrogacy have access to information about their genetic and gestational origins. We provisionally propose creating a national register of surrogacy arrangements to record for each child born through surrogacy the identity of their intended parents, the identity of the surrogate and information about any gamete donors. We also ask whether non-identifying information about the intended parents and surrogate should be collected, which already happens in the case of gamete donors. Now, how that information reaches the register would depend on the type of surrogacy arrangement. If it's onto the new pathway, it would be sent to be registered by the regulator surrogacy organisation or licensed clinic. Onto the old pathway, it could be gathered through questions asked on the parental order application. There should note that we do also say that any information registered would have to be verified in order to do so. If non-identifying information is collected, we suggest that should be accessible to the child at 16, identifiable information would be accessible at 18. We also consider who else might want to have access to the register to identify people if they all want to meet up. We have in mind here, for example, children born through the same surrogate who have a genetic relationship to each other although are not born for the same intended parents. We also ask if there might be an interest in children who are born through the same surrogate but who do not have a genetic relationship to each other may still want to be able to find each other and meet up. So, looking at that perhaps unexplored relationship of children whose only connection is that they have been carried by the same gestational surrogate. So, that is a whistle stop tour. I set a Yn's 500 pages in 15 minutes. I'll take a deep breath at the beginning and see what came out. I hope it gives you a flavour of what we have said. There are a number of people from the teams at the Law Commission here for the conference so please do talk to us over the next couple of days. Thank you Yn's.